World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou
Till March 1, 2015
About 1:
The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou, a large-scale immersive environment that combines his sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks and recorded sound. Assembled from a stunning diversity of materials and found objects, Tayou’s art is characterized by an aesthetic of accumulation. He pierces Styrofoam with thousands of pins and razorblades, stacks hundreds of birdhouses against a wall, and adorns crystal glass figures with beads, plastic flowers, and feathers. This approach derives in part from the ways African sculpture is empowered with accumulations of materials to assert various kinds of religious, social, and political authority. Tayou uses this aesthetic to raise searching questions about inequalities of wealth and power in today’s postcolonial, global context at the same time he explores the hidden, spiritual forces that infuse ordinary, everyday life in African cities.
Installation View, 2014.
Installation View, 2014.
Installation, detail, 2014.
Quote of Tayou:
This project is the continuation in my long journey toward the unknown,
An initiatory process at the heart of contemporary rituals,
Ought I to believe or not believe?
A same-titled book published in conjunction with the exhibition will feature essays by Rodrigues and Leora Maltz-Leca, Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture, Rhode Island School of Design.
About the Artist
Update, 2014.
About 2:
Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon in 1966, and has been living and working for the last decade in Flemish-speaking Ghent, Belgium. In the 1990s, while still in Cameroon, Tayou embarked on a law degree, but left mid-way to pursue work as an artist. Following a kind of art training common in many African contexts, Tayou learned informally from other artists and developed his skills independently. He became a key figure in the contemporary art scene in Douala—one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in Cameroon—which since the early 1990s has been a center of experimental and often socially conscious work built on performance, installation, and site-specific intervention. In 1996, he participated in the Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal and emerged on the international biennial circuit, exhibiting at the Sydney Biennial in 1998, Documenta 11 in 2002, and the Tate Modern’s Triennial in 2009, among numerous others. Also in 2009, Tayou produced one of the largest installations in curator Daniel Birnbaum’s Making Worlds international exhibition for the Venice Biennale. He is represented by Gallery Continua in San Gimignano, Italy, and travels frequently between Europe and Africa.
