KAB18 second Master Studio has opened with Pascale Marthine Tayou, installation and multi media artist from Cameroon
“Tayou’s work is directly influenced by the scenes he witnesses in the countries he visits. He collects ephemera from his journeys, including train and airline ticket stubs, restaurant and shop receipts and labels or wrappings for socks, razors, batteries and plastic bags. Tayou’s insistent reuse and recycling of these objects reminds us that contemporary life is inextricably linked with economics, migration and politics.” (Karene, Write. “Arts in America”). Retrieved 13 February 2013
Pascale Marthine Tayou, Source: Secret Garden, Drome Magazine
Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon in 1966. He lives and works between Ghent and Yaoundé. Versatility characterizes his work. He explores all sorts of mediums – sculpture, installation, drawing, video – and although the themes vary, they all take as a starting point the image of the artist. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive, heterogeneous and eschews pre-established patterns. Tayou’s creations all have a common characteristic: they portray the image of man who travels around the world and explores the question of the global village. It is in this context that Tayou examines his African origins and the questions they raise. The Falling Houses consist of prints on wood. They sometimes evoke architectures and are composed of a multiplicity of images of various origins. These “dwellings” are a reference to Chinua Achebe’s famous novel, Things Fall Apart. “This house suspended from the ceiling is the house of dogmas, joys, respite, fears, frustrations, misfortune, happiness. This house is us, the human species.”
Pascale will open his studio and share his skills and knowledge with 7 selected talented artists. They will engage into dialogues, produce new work together and learn from each other during 9 day intensive interactions.
Pascale Marthine Tayou – 4rd June – 13th June 2018 at Afriart Gallery on 7th, Industrial Area
Pascale selected the following seven Apprentices to participate in his Studio:
EBIROTTO, Dreams, Installed in Eindhoven during the Dutch Design Week, Sandra Suubi
Sandra Suubi (Uganda)
Nakitto Sandra Suubi was born in Kampala, Uganda in 1990. Many of Suubi’s sculptural installations are big in form and size, depicting messages of hope and encouraging people to dream and believe in themselves. Working mainly with recycled plastic and metal, most recently—experimenting with different forms of found materials found with the particular communities in which she works in Kampala, Uganda and other parts of the world.
Suubi studies these communities through observation, discussions with the people living with in these communities and collects and experiments with the different media found within these communities. The installations add to the discussion about the function of objects such as used plastic bottles (transformation and application) in everyday life and the role of artists as the eye of society. She believes that materials such as plastic which is not biodegradable, ‘Must work for us if it stays with us.’
Suubi received a BA from the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Art , Makerere University, Kampala Uganda, (2014) and since has taken part in different festivals, art projects and residencies, in and out of Uganda. She has participated in the Bayimba International Festival( 2013), LaBa! Festival (2014), KLA Art (2014), Garbage collectors ( 2014), Atwork (2015) and Age Of Wonderland during the Dutch Design Week ( 2014). Suubi currently graduated with a Masters in Fine Art at the Margaret Trowel School of Industrial and Fine art.
Nakitto Sandra Suubi lives and works in Kampala, Uganda.
Astrid Mourik de Wit, Untitled
Astrid Mourik de Wit (Netherlands)
Astrid, born 1958, is from the Netherlands and has lived in Uganda for several years. She is married and has two grown-up children. Astrid completed her Arts Education at NAU in the Netherlands recently. However, she says: “I have been involved with arts since I was a child, designing dresses for my Barbie dolls, jewelry (metal), sculpturing with ceramics”. She paints and draws as well. Lately, she is also designing patterns for fabric and wallpaper and started to get more involved with digital art and photography.
Astrid’s sculptures are an assembly of everyday objects: discarded items or just a compressed piece of metal. A found object can be the starting point for a sculpture. The shape, material and color are herewith determining. By adding contrasting objects and materials an image evolves. Especially the connections used, such as metal pins, pipes and tubes, a piece of wire or rope, are crucial and of essence! They become like drawn pencil lines in the space.
“A tension field must emerge in the sculpture, which does allows the viewer to get an ambiguous image. It may be awkward and extreme. Calm and exaggerated, fragile and coarse, beautiful and unpolished. These contrasts must reinforce each other. My sculpture must be a perceptual experience for the viewer.”
Delphine Buysse, Résidency at Nafasi Art Space, Daraja la Utamaduni, installation of weaved threads, 2017
Delphine Buysse (Belgium)
Delphine Buysse is a Belgian visual artist (engraving on glass, Plexiglas, installations and mix media) and curator freshly arrived in Dakar after working for eleven years in Tanzania. Autodidact, she has developed a way of working on the spot she first chooses a subject – which is never harmless but always interpellant – and then embarking the field to collect observations, information and finally synthetise them through the prism of her experiences and feelings creating a coherent thread with writings.
Time is probably the most recurrent and common theme in her work that she likes to investigate through scientific psychological and philosophical angles, with precision, in repetition and serie. She has worked on the topic of confinement, emptiness, choice, desire, memory and tradition.
Coming from printmaking, she has always spent her time patterning and has always loved to observe maps. The abstract is the best way for her to synthetise her theoretical researches and concerns with her attraction for patience’s work in the ambivalence of glass while playing with light and shadows.
Venus Nigra, pearls, wax, rasin, 60x30x28 cm, Beya Gilla Gacha, 2017.
Beya Gille Gacha (France)
Beya Gille Gacha was born on the 8th December 1990 in Paris, of a Cameroonian mother and a French father.
As an adolescent, she chose to go to a school of Applied Art where she discovered plastic arts. She participated in her first exhibition called AFRIKANSKA PENSLAR in Stockholm in 2009. While still creating, she decided to follow her passion for art history and studied at the Ecole du Louvre (EDL). Unable to find a balance between theoretical studies and plastic creations, she left the EDL after 2 years and created in 2013 an association thought as an artistic collective: NÉFE.
Following a trip to Cameroon in the Grassland, her motherland, in 2009, she drew her inspiration from passport masks to create her artwork, sculptures and installations, always addressing social and societal themes. It is also
during this trip that she discovered beading workshops at the NGO her aunt founded and that she started research focused on the production of beaded sculptures.
She traveled several times to Cameroon between 2010 and 2016, for volunteering missions especially, where she gave plastic art classes to children and helped in the management of the NGO. At the same time, she also organized exhibitions in France and presented her beaded sculptures for the first time in late 2016.
She re-interprets beading in a contemporary and personal way, mixing rules of African and Occidental classicism. Using beads as the skin of her sculptures is a statement: in the Bamileke tradition, beading furniture or an artwork is a way to show material wealth and value, just like covering it in gold or ivory; in her process, she beads individuals to reveal their wealth as human beings, to defend the fact that each human being has a value.
She accompanies each of her artworks with texts and digital and audiovisual artwork. In this way, she proposes
variable and progressive installations that illustrate her questioning in a more complex way.
John Baptist Sekubulwa, Untitled, 2017
John Baptist Sekubulwa (Uganda)
Sekubulwa John Baptist is a Ugandan artist born in Kisubi. He graduated from Margaret Trowel School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University.
Sekubulwa’s surreal paintings and drawings are a visual commentary and critique of social, political, religious events around him and the world at large. They are intended to draw a message that provoke dialogue.
After his residence at 32degrees East in Kampala, he came up with new media in form of jerrycans, commenting about the influence of Pentecostal churches on African society nowadays. In his work he represents church followers as humans with sheep heads and pastors as real humans, echoing the Bible story of the “parable of shepherd”. The work consists of drawn and cut images using a jerrycan as medium. Sekubulwa’s message is: “religion has become plastic and the followers are depending on it like they would depend on a jerrycan in times of drought”.
Kaloki Nyamai, Untitled.
Kaloki Nyamai (Kenya)
Kaloki Nyamai’s painting practice entwines material investigation with a wide-reaching exploration of subject matter. Grounded in hidden narratives, uneasy stories of identity, environment and memory, Kaloki avoids explicit statements; instead offering fragments to be pieced together slowly. He often works on an ambitious scale over a long period of time, combining layers of acrylic paint with collage elements. The lengthy, searching process employed in the making of the works is mirrored in the experience of viewing them.
Kaloki describes how important storytelling is to the passing on of African history – in many of his paintings he imagines these passed on stories as boxes, symbolising the social, cultural, economic, political positions we are located in, or locate ourselves in. Kaloki’s interest in the power of storytelling, and the flexibility of meaning is also shown in his titling. His painting titles are all in the Kamba language, reinforcing the importance of interpretation and perception in his paintings. His visual language is layered and implicit, allowing the works to reveal themselves gradually and offering potential for new connotations though each viewers translation.
Doddridge Busingye (Uganda)
Doddridge Busingye, is a Ugandan born in 1990. He graduated in 2015 with Bachelor of Art and Industrial Design from Kyambogo University. Since then, he has been practicing painting, sculpture, graphic design and installation art at Doddridge Art Studio and has exhibited in several art exhibitions and festivals. Recently he picked interest in Art in Public space after participating in the MabArti challenge where he won the second prize.