PASCALE MARTHINE TAYOU. BOOMERANG

Pascale Marthine Tayou’s belief in the artist’s social responsibility to expose important political, ecological and economic problems is central to his work. He introduces themes in which he reflects on our consumer society and postcolonial Africa and uses his Afro-European identity to carry out an unremitting examination of what binds us all together. He sees this shared humanity as multi-coloured rather than black or white, and as something that should not be restricted by borders between countries or people.

Tayou highlights the paradoxes of our society in multi-coloured assemblages of contrasting objects, materials and media such as drawings, performance, photography, video, assemblages, graffiti…He often creates impressive installations in situ, made up of found objects – ranging from plastic bags to plants, face cloths or even chocolate – as he playfully makes links between his own creations or with traditional African objects such as wooden masks or textiles.

Paul Dujardin, CEO BOZAR: “In no way can Tayou’s art be reduced to his African roots. He is a nomadic artist who doesn’t bother with psychological and geographic borders. He raises major geopolitical issues in an almost light-hearted manner. As I walk past his installations, I can hear his liberating laughter ringing in my ears.”

BOOMERANG

The concept of BOOMERANG refers to the consequences of what people– and humanity as a whole– are likely to get thrown back in their faces in the course of time. Pascale Marthine Tayou: “I will never make political art. But I always try to approach and pin down politics in a visual, tangible form. In this way I hope to develop a positive methodology of freedom.”

BOOMERANG brings together around 80 recent works (2010-2015). The presentation runs through the Centre for Fine Arts like a colourful thread. The monumental work Coton Tige, a cloud of cotton wool with pointed stakes in it which floats in the halls, is a reference to slavery and the colonial cotton plantations. The ecological impact of global consumer society is central to works such as Octopus (a bundle of petrol pump tubes) or Oléoduc (waste water pipes that wends their way around the exhibition space, past statistics about the most polluted places in the world). In the work David Crossing the Moon he brings the icons of the three major monotheistic religions together in a single overlapping symbol.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY Pascale Marthine Tayou

Pascale Marthine Tayou (°1967, Yaoundé, Cameroon) lives and works in Ghent. He studied Law at the University of Yaoundé, but after graduation he became disillusioned due to all the injustice he came across. He soon felt that art was a better means of expressing his ideas and social engagement. At the start of the 1990s he began his artistic career as a self-taught artist. Since then he has been steadily building up his international career with solo exhibitions in, amongst others, the Fowler Museum UCLA (Los Angeles, 2014), Kunsthaus (Bregenz, 2014), MACRO (Rome, 2012), MUDAM (Luxemburg, 2011), MAC (Lyon, 2011) and Malmö Konsthall (Malmö, 2010).
It is not his first time at the Centre for Fine Arts. In 2003 he participated in the group exhibition Transfer(t)s with two installations with African flags.

CO-PRODUCTION

The exhibition BOOMERANG is a co-production with the Serpentine Galleries, and was previously presented at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (04.03 > 17.05.2015). Julia Peyton-Jones, director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and Serpentine co-director and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist describe Tayou’s work as “ingenious creations imbued with a strange and enticing magic which has the power to bind us all together". Okwui Enwezor, curator of the central exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale, labelled Tayou’s strategy “nomadic imagination”.

BOOMERANG is produced by the Serpentine Galleries, London, in collaboration with BOZAR With the participation of: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins Supported by: Belgian Federal Public Service, Foreign Affairs, Foreign trade & Development Cooperation