–
KIFOULI DOSSOU Écoutez l’histoire ! Xwénouhô Nougnouin
Coming soon
Art Space
Archive
–
Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui Georges Adéagbo
–
Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui Georges Adéagbo
Georges Adéagbo is presenting a new and unique work specially produced for the opening of the Atlantic art space in Ouidah, in collaboration with Stephan Köhler, Kulturforum Süd-Nord. Adéagbo used to live in Ouidah, a city where his family has been established for several generations. Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui is therefore a major installation in his career: for the first time, he is digging deep into his intimacy with the exceptional city.
Georges Adéagbo shares his knowledge of the history and legends of Ouidah, while recalling his own memories. A meeting place between the dead and the living, Ouidah is a city where the past continually exerts its influence over the present, where time studies our actions. To each person seeking answers to the questions posed by time, Georges Adéagbo’s installation offers sources and echoes, present contingencies as well as lessons to be learned from the past, a forest of clues from which we can eventually emerge with a finer knowledge of the world and of ourselves.
Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui, 2022
«Men and things, both intertwined, make history.» Arlette Farge, Le peuple et les choses, 2015
Georges Adéagbo is an artist, philosopher, and storyteller. At 80 years old, he moves from continent to continent to present his installations, always elaborated specifically for the exhibition space and the country hosting them. Georges Adéagbo began gathering objects and writings and arranging them to create installations in 1971, in Cotonou. His collections of forgotten or abandoned objects began during solitary walks in the streets of Cotonou and on the beach, after which he created small installations in the courtyard of the family plot. His work remained confidential until 1993, when Jean-Michel Rousset, the assistant to the exhibition curator André Magnin, came to visit him by chance. Six years later, in 1999, Georges Adéagbo was the first African artist to be awarded a jury prize at the Venice Biennale for his installation Venise d’hier, Venise d’aujourd’hui..! L’histoire du lion at the Campo dell’Arsenale. This event also marks his first collaboration with Stephan Köhler, who became the coordinator on all his exhibitions.
Georges Adéagbo’s installations are direct evocations of his life, as it is given to him, and as he receives it. He creates his works using found objects and works by other people, gathering books, newspapers, records, sculptures, or clothes and then arranging them meticulously in a frieze, on the floor and on walls. The apparent simplicity of the process helps us understand what is truly essential: that things are there, and that it is up to us, when they cross our path, to pay attention to what they can teach us and to adjust our gaze to what is too often overlooked. Georges Adéagbo is our guide in this exercise in reading, leaving traces of his own meditations in his installations, in the form of messages, proverbs, oracles and hypotheses written by hand in deconstructed French.
In each book, object, and silent image, answers to the riddles that make up the world are hidden. By placing them side by side and letting their formal or semantic relationships form a composition, Georges Adéagbo allows these pieces of the world to enter into dialogue and shape a narrative. In doing so, he produces a form of reality which is an alternative to the discursive logic inherited from the West: a visual and linguistic practice that places the world and empirical speculation at the forefront, instead of the artist and his own rationality. As he is a great storyteller and organizer, Georges Adéagbo can ask questions and leave the answers to the objects he encounters – the formula “art is in nature..!” returns like a refrain in several of his installations.
Georges Adéagbo’s life, marked by solitude and suffering, naturally led to his becoming a recognized artist. Self-taught, he has maintained great freedom of expression in the world of conceptual art. He willingly explains his work on space, deciphers the messages conveyed by his groups of objects, and directly imparts to us his own history, dreams and convictions. His installations are not separate from his life: every day, Georges Adéagbo searches, classifies and orders documents and objects that sustain his reflection on the world. The familiar and the erudite, the fantastic and the functional are reconciled in his work, without hierarchical categorization. Georges Adéagbo invites us to take time to reread the world with an untarnished curiosity. Serene images illustrating a calendar can stand alongside sculptures from the Western Middle Ages and present-day Benin: as in life, time takes on an elastic and relative quality, cultures mingle, languages intertwine. We reflect on universal ideas – religion, art, love, filiation, knowledge – by exploring what is in front of us, and by choosing the things that will bring us answers. Such availability to the world is what makes Georges Adéagbo’s work so radical: by challenging the logical systems of a dominant Western culture and deconstructing the language of the former colonizer, he offers us an open system where we can think freely.
Press visit with the artist: December 3 11am–12am
Opening December 3, 12am–5pm
Walking lunch in the garden of the FZ
Please RSVP: contact@atlantic-art.org
George Adéagbo, Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui, Atlantic
–
Ouidah d’hier et Ouidah d’aujourd’hui Georges Adéagbo
Biography
Georges Adéagbo was awarded the DAAD Prize in 2006, as well as the Finkender Prize in 2017 and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2020. Together with Stephan Köhler, founder of Kulturforum Süd-Nord Cotonou-Hamburg, the artist presents his works in major institutions such as Kindl, Berlin (2021) ; Maison Tavel, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva (2021) ; Warburg-Haus, Hamburg (2019) : Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen (2018) ; Kunsthaus Hamburg (2017) ; Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2016) ; Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2014) ; MAK, Vienna (2009) ; Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (2008) ; Ludwig Museum, Cologne (2004) ; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyoto (2000) ; MoMA PS1, New York (2000) or Le Quartier, Centre d’art contemporain, Quimper (1997).
Georges Adéagbo’s works are held in various museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris; Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva; Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Berlin; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyoto; KIASMA, Helsinki; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.
–
Les 7 Jumeaux David Adebay, Raoul Ahoungnimon, Sadikou Arafat, Bénédicte Dovonou, Kpanou Glorieux, Agbodedj Hamidath & Adelakoun Honorat
–
Les 7 Jumeaux David Adebay, Raoul Ahoungnimon, Sadikou Arafat, Bénédicte Dovonou, Kpanou Glorieux, Agbodedj Hamidath & Adelakoun Honorat
ATLANTIC IS PROUD TO PRESENT THE GROUP EXHIBITION « LES 7 JUMEAUX » A SET OF PAINTINGS THAT ARE MUCH MORE THAN CREATIVE WORKS. THESE PIECES CONTRIBUTE TO THE ARTISTS’ SOCIAL INCLUSION AND TO CHANGING THE WAY WE SEE THEM.
Louis Oké-Agbo’s therapy center in Porto-Novo is a unique place where art is a means to helping people with mental illnesses and disabilities. He is an artist and photographer from Benin who opened the center in 2017. The center cares for women and men affected by psychological and behavioral problems as well as disabilities. In this courtyard arranged as a studio and opening onto one of Tokpota’s streets -a working-class neighborhood in Porto Novo-the patients dance, play percussions, take photographs, draw and paint. It is a place for total freedom of expression cared for by volunteer workers, artists, psychologists and art therapy specialists.
At the moment, the center welcomes 17 patients. This shows that in spite of a very low budget it delivers care, provides wellbeing and treats with respect those who are considered as crazy and, as such, are rejected and sometimes marginalized. In Benin madness is not considered as an illness but rather as a punishment from a god or goddess to someone who broke a social rule or to someone who disrespected a spiritual entity, it may also be considered as a state resulting from a voodoo god incarnated in a human being and therefore society will see them as different.
Bright colors, simplified figures seldom on their own and often in contact with each other, revisited voodoo images… In their works David Adebayo, Hamidath Agbodedil, Bénédicte Dovonou, to mention a few, seem to liberate raw, vital emotions; perhaps this is because until now they had not been able to speak about those emotions. Their work touches us, questions us, draws our attention. This is why they are considered artists.
Louis Oké-Agbo devotes himself to these men and women considered outcasts because he «felt that through art, I could help them». Photography helped him to keep afloat, he was the eldest of a poor family of twelve children. Ten years ago, when he started taking pictures of mad people in the streets -which was the beginning of his own art therapy project-he begun to gain awareness of his own flaws. Today Louis Oké-Agbo and the center’s residents share more than time and attention together, they share the place art has in their lives.
The money resulting from sales will be allocated by Atlantic to Vie et Solidarité, the NGO that manages the center.
–
Les 7 Jumeaux David Adebay, Raoul Ahoungnimon, Sadikou Arafat, Bénédicte Dovonou, Kpanou Glorieux, Agbodedj Hamidath & Adelakoun Honorat
Off-Site
Information
Right beside the Zinsou Foundation
Open from Wednesday to Sunday, 11am – 5pm
And by appointment
Whatsapp +22969582525
contact@atlantic-art.org
Instagram: @atlanticartspaceouidah
