Ranti Bam is a British-Nigerian artist born in 1978 in Lagos, Nigeria, currently living and working between London, Lagos and Paris. She graduated from Sir John Cass School (London) and was admitted to the renowned City Lit ceramics course. Having grown up on two continents, clay has become a means for the artist to give coherent form to her multiple identities and to fully inhabit the material and spiritual culture of both worlds. Fusing a painterly and sculptural approach, Ranti Bam works with clay in its natural, unreinforced state and pushes the material to its limits of tangibility, bringing her work into intimate resonance with concepts of fragility and vulnerability.
Dimitri Fagbohoun was born in 1972 in Cotonou, Benin. He lives and works between Paris, Brussels and Cotonou. A Beninese-Ukrainian artist, Dimitri Fagbohoun’s work is inseparable from his own experience and his plural identity. Proteriform, through the heterogeneous forms used, his works express a relationship to identities and history in which his writing disturbs the models that constitute them. Through his practice of ceramics, we find traditions and an imaginary world linked to alchemy and the transformation of earth by fire. Between homage to African plastic and the creation of a new cosmogony, it is in fact his own syncretism that the artist stages. The resulting forms integrate the importance of reappropriating one’s heritage while at the same time being creative and new. This is the approach taken in her son’s drawings from the Adiyo corpus, which are the plastic testimony of conversations between her son and the invisible. The same is true of the tree of life One hundred and thousand nights, which brings together symbolic elements from the Bantu, Voodoo and Kabbalah traditions, in which the artist reveals the power of the incarnate word, here materialised, expressed and revealed. On the copper discs, the suns of a new constellation, rest reinterpreted African masks, shiny black, in the centre of which beats a powerful heart. The installation thus confronts us with the mystical forces of a secret cosmology whose sun is the earth, bearer of the world’s memory and link between all living beings.
Fanny Irina was born in 2000 in Bondy, France, and currently lives in Paris, where she is a fourth-year student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Like a storyteller, Fanny Irina tells us stories accompanied by hybrid characters. Through the variety of materials she explores - pencil, pastel, paint on textile, ceramics - themes recur, evoking a world at the crossroads of the fantastic and the intimate. The series of drawings by Fanny Irina presented in the exhibition Ce que le monde doit à la nuit (What the world owes to the night) testify to a desire to exhaust certain forms. The half-reclining figure, the raised bust. The one who seems to be flying away, a symbol of physical and mental freedom. The reclining lioness, protector, heroine of this new series of works. The trees, characters that evoke questions of rootedness, territory and place. In parallel with her drawings, Fanny Irina presents part of her ceramic work, initiated at the beginning of 2022. Inspired by a card game, Fanny’s works have the same format but compose a game whose rules are unknown. Some are flat, covered with different glazes, glossy or matt, sometimes almost greedy, more or less iridescent. They seem to contain in their power the shapes that we find sculpted on the surface of other cards - or is it at the bottom of them? Animal heads, perhaps totems, a wolf, a fox, a fish, a bear, a lion. They appear or disappear, they do not reveal themselves completely, still protected by their earthy world. A certain tenderness emerges, perhaps also a disturbance, born of the confrontation with these curiously familiar looks. A sort of disquieting strangeness that resonates fully with the artist’s other works.
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien was born in 1990 in Paris, where she now lives and works. A maker of new forms, an explorer of materials and signs, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien defines herself as a storyteller of poems. In her work, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien explores the links between traditional African practices, universalist thought and her own hybrid culture as a French woman from the Ivory Coast. The status of the artist’s works is plural, sometimes cartographies or protective totems, they also seem to take on the guise of sacred relics, housing organic matter, horsehair or strands of hair, some of which are arranged in such a way as to evoke eyelashes, and thus a gaze, a presence. In addition to the presence of ceramics in her textile works, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien develops an independent practice of clay. Her creations carry memory, information and imagination, bearing witness to the visible and invisible worlds. There is a strong influence of Akan culture, particularly through the Dja Yobwe - «Object of the Dja» - these stones have a strong social and ritual importance in Akan society. Reworked by Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, these ancestral objects take on new forms and invite us to define our own boundaries.
Roméo Mivekannin was born in 1986 in Bouake, Ivory Coast. He now lives and works between Toulouse in France and Cotonou in Benin. At the crossroads of inherited tradition and the contemporary world, Roméo Mivekannin integrates his creations within an ancestral temporality, making his own rituals, echoing the voodoo cosmology, very present in Benin. As the two works presented in this exhibition show, Roméo Mivekannin explores a certain aesthetic formalism, bordering on brutalism, through his now classic medium of painting and dyeing on loose canvas, but also through his more recent encounter with ceramics. The artist is inspired by African ritual and spiritual forms and revisits them through a purification of forms and a quest for their radical essence. Clay is worked in the same spirit, in search of a material on the verge of metal, which blurs the established boundaries between disciplines. The sculpture presented is entitled Sadó, which in Fon refers to Sadanù, which was the place of reconciliation between four brothers in Benin, whose story has been repeated orally for decades. During the reconciliation, one of the four brothers, Gè (meaning the world), died and was buried there. Following this encounter, the other three brothers separated, and two of them founded the kingdom of Abomey, where Romeo Mivekannin originated. Aesthetically, the Sadó work expresses the cultural mixture of forms on the African continent and the circulation of inspirations and motifs. The very notion of mixture also refers to the artist’s intimate experience, arriving in France at the age of 17 and suddenly confronted with a radical otherness, which was at the origin of what Roméo considers a metamorphosis of his being.
Sadikou Oukpedjo was born in 1970 in Kétao, Togo. Sadikou Oukpedjo lives and works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. For Sadikou Oukpedjo, tales, cosmogony, rites and witchcraft are all attempts and tools created by man to and tools created by man in order to find his place in the world and learn to know himself. By exploring the ambiguous relationship that man has with his animality, he questions our awareness of the cruelty of human relationships, in Africa and in the world. The invisible and its power, the unknown and the hidden, appear as a red thread in the exploration of human consciousness as a quest that runs through the evolution of his plastic research. The installation presented here dates from 2015 but has never before been presented in this form. It recalls Sadikou Oukpedjo’s early training in sculpture, particularly in terracotta, in Paul Ahyi’s workshop in Togo. The motifs of the heads and the cage, which are very present in the artist’s work, are also present and always seem to have a magical power. They sometimes seem to have been revealed to us from time immemorial, as if excavated from a place preserved by the passage of time. Whose heads are these piled up behind bars? What does their silence or their silent cry say? Are they not ours, locked in our illusions, our beliefs or our fears? Sadikou Oukpedjo’s poetic enterprise is to go beyond seduction, to go beyond fear, to get out of inertia and to make the pictorial space a place of invention of new mythologies.
