Galerie Cécile Fakhoury is pleased to present Babitopie (Entre-Deux), a duo exhibition by artists Jean Servais Somain and Ana Zulma.
"Between the two is a voice,
Carillons and balafons chime without limit.
There, where the winds in full flight
Spill their scintillation.
The night is dying.
Everything is nothing but repetition."
Excerpt from the poem I'm Home, Ana Zulma
For their second collaboration, Jean Servais Somian and Ana Zulma bring together characters around life tales. Stories that are sometimes common, sometimes singular are told on one side and written on the other. Somian and Zulma take us on a poetic odyssey led by their inexhaustible imagination: the two artists anchor their story in a necessity to clear the world. Jean Servais Somian diverts the function of objects and places them at the border of two worlds, between art and design; Ana Zulma questions concepts through visual narratives whose scope extends beyond photography to a vibrant image in textures and volumes.
Plastic basins become migratory capsules and passengers board towards the stars. United in a field of paradoxes and creators of links within divergences, Jean Servais Somain and Ana Zulma breathe into us the art of listening to the unspeakable and magical in between.
Image : Ma princesse Bassamoise
Jean Servais Somian
Born in 1971 in Adiake, Côte d'Ivoire, Jean Servais Somian lives and works in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.
Jean Servais Somian began his career as a designer by following a training course at the Georges Ghandour carpentry and cabinet-making centre in Abidjan, then at the Grand-Bassam craft centre in Côte d'Ivoire. He later joined the design and conception agency Daniel Beck in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Inspired by many years spent between Africa and Europe, Jean Servais Somian claims in his work an approach rich with influences, hybrid and fluid. He draws from an ancestral culture the forms of certain objects of African daily life which he reinterprets through refined lines and touches of colour and materials that have become characteristic of his work. Basins, totem trees, pirogues are transformed under the gaze of the designer into stools, bookcases and benches whose wood (coconut, ebony, or amazaque) completes the tribute to the richness of the African lands that saw them born.
All the objects are designed and made in Côte d'Ivoire where Jean Servais Somian opened his design studios in 2018, one in Grand Bassam for the sculpture of the pieces, the other in Abidjan for cabinet-making. He favours the singular character of each of his creations and develops an aesthetic reflection at the crossroads of art and design. Each of his objects produced in very small quantities retains its original utilitarian and functional dimension, while the plastic design work of the pieces builds eloquent visual bridges with contemporary sculpture.
His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in Africa, Europe, the United States and Latin America. In 2019, he won the prize for the best design piece at the Beirut Design Art Fair in Beirut, Lebanon.
Exhibitions (selection): Africa Africa, Palazzo Litta, Milan, Italy (2018); The Space Between, 50 Golborne, London, United Kingdom (2017); Dakar Martigny, Musée de Martigny, Switzerland (2016); Now le OFF, Paris Design Week, Musée du Design et du Textile, Paris, France (2015); Festival Afrique dans tous les sens, Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, Paris, France (2011) ; Biennale Internationale du Design de Saint-Etienne, France (2002)
Ana Zulma
Born in 1978 in Lyon, France. Lives and works in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.
Ana Zulma aka Anne-Laure Gougne is a graduate of Beaux Arts de Lyon. Her artistic practice has developed around a multidisciplinary approach that gives substance to a protean and evolving work.
From the early years of her career when Ana was still only Zulma, an imaginary double, a totalitarian and misanthropic creature, the artist retained a deep interest in the forms of self-reflection and world narratives. Exploring the genre of performance, Zulma's character was a pretext to exorcise buried ills by reinventing ways of saying oneself and one's context through the body's action in space.
Zulma and Ana, two antitheses that now meet in the avatar of a storyteller artist. Her recent photographic works also borrow from the performative in their realization. Each work is constructed by following a series of rituals. Ana Zulma grabs photographs - her own, those of others - as one grabs a book and observes them carefully in search of the punctum of the image, that point of photography that crystallizes meaning and marks for her the beginning of her artistic interpretation/reinterpretation.
Ana Zulma scrapes, pierces, sews, paints, alters the material in the idea of bringing out new readings: magnify the imperfect, favors chance over the obsession for perfection, and finally turns the memory towards the future. Because the artist's approach, often built around series that she enriches over time, responds to her deep desire for reconciliation. In this way, the artist explores the reverberation of opposites, bringing together reality and its ideal, the visible and the invisible, drawing on this in-between, the creative energy of new imaginaries.
Exhibitions (selection) : Vie de procelaine, Biennale de Lyon, Galerie Françoise Besson, Lyon, France (2019); Étrange Évidence, Hommage à l'artiste Jackie Kayser, Galerie Françoise Besson, Lyon, France (2018); La grande histoire, 1-54 Art Fair Marrakech, Maroc (2018) ; La grande histoire fragmentée, Villa Savoya, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (2018); Family photo, OFF Rencontres de la Photographie, Bamako, Mali (2017); Babitopie, Galerie Louisimone Guirandou, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (2016).