Curation: Franck Hermann Ekra (art critic, curator)
Exhibition architecture: Ernest Dükü & Franck Hermann Ekra, in collaboration with architect and designer Issa Diabaté.
In “New Dawn”, a poem from Men of All Continents written to celebrate the dawn of independence and creative freedoms, Dadié proclaims “the time of the child’s dream.” He calls for a revitalisation of ancient forms of expression and popular dreamworlds within the New City imagined by earlier generations: a way of invoking an alternative modernity. A modernity freed from the ambiguities of the European pictorial and sculptural avant-gardes’ romantic rediscovery of so-called “Negro arts” in the twentieth century.
Since the seminal exhibition Sculpted Bodies, Adorned Bodies, Masked Bodies (1989), which explored at the Grand Palais in Paris the relationship between ancestrality and tutelary spirits in the arts of Côte d’Ivoire, the bond between aesthetics and spiritualities has remained largely underestimated in projections of this scene. And yet contemporary creation is marked by the insistent presence of the invisible and of sacred geometries, from Christian Lattier and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to Ouattara Watts and Ernest Dükü. For the latter, the first two stand as totemic figures, visual references without which it is difficult to gain full access to his formal vocabulary. In literature, Dadié, Kourouma and Adiaffi perform the same function: supporting columns for an oeuvre of synthesis.
A painter and architect, Dükü shifts the questioning of matter and volume that preoccupied the artists of the Vohou-vohou movement, which dominated the Beaux-Arts of Abidjan during his years of formation, toward metaphysical territories where substance always exceeds form. Influenced by the revivalist intuitions of the Negro-Caribbean current active along the shores of the Ébrié Lagoon, by the Fwomajé group, by AfriCOBRA, and by major artists such as Wilfredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dükü conceives an aesthetic of relation of astonishing plasticity. It draws its source from Pharaonic Egypt and Nubia as revisited by Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilisation or Barbarism (1981), but above all in his masterwork The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1967).
The Time of the Child’s Dream — Invisible Architectures invites Ernest Dükü to open the gates of our inner City in dialogue with two major artists of trans-African modernities: Wèrèwèrè Liking and Souleymane Keïta. A poet shaped by performance, ritual theatre and the performing arts, the former considers herself a kind of vibratory continuity of her ancestors. She has developed an original body of work that unfolds a mysterious grammar, carried by a vision sensitive to every cosmic order. The selection of Liking will be limited to three paintings from the series The Fantastic Cities.
The latter is affiliated with the first generation of the Dakar School, whose flowering was encouraged by the poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor in order to translate the philosophical conceptions of Négritude into visual form. His economy of light and the repetition of signs characterise a painting that joyfully reconnects with the hermeticism of Sudano-Sahelian initiatory societies. Keïta’s corpus will likewise focus on three works from the series Scarifications and Hunter’s Shirt.
In the Gallery’s Project Space, Invisible Architectures — Dreams in Mirror will bring together, in one display, seven trans-African artists around Ernest Dükü: Assoukrou Ake; Dalila Dalleas Bouzar; François-Xavier Gbrè; Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien; Roméo Mivekannin; Cheikh Ndiaye; and Ouattara Watts.
Through their visual unity, the two spaces give form to the idea of rebirth: the absolute continuity between night and the birth of day beneath the starry vault, which evokes the goddess Nut, personifying the course of light—the fathomless black upon which the stars, her children, navigate. She is mistress of the principle of life and death, and the promise of resurrection. She bears witness to the voyage of Ra (the Sun god) and his companions in a barque… through the twelve gates of the underworld depicted in the Book of Gates, symbolising the reckoning of the hours in the day-night-day cycle. The exhibition architecture seeks to reaffirm the scenographic gesture as a practice that is at once curatorial and artistic.
