SOFACQ Gallery

* 1967 Yaoundé, Cameroon. Lives in Brussels, Belgium, and in Douala, Cameroon.

Pascale Marthine Tayou took a law degree in Douala in the early 1990s but soon began practicing as an autodidactic artist. A socially conscious visual activist, Tayou emerged on the national and international scene with drawings, sculptures and installations that focused attention on the AIDS crisis in collaboration with the Douala-based Doual'art Association.

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His work mines popular visual culture and social practices, using improvisational methods to construct installations relentlessly focused on the political and social conditions of postcolonial Africa. From his early sculptures, constructed from an assorted range of found objects—condoms, discarded plastic dolls, plant materials, planks, detritus, graffiti, etc—to the more recent sprawling installations (Colorful Maze, 1997, Crazy Nomad, 1999, Game Station, 2002) made of plastic bags, flags, houses, electronic gadgets, cars, and such, Tayou broaches issues that deal as much with nationalism, exile, migration and global power relations, as with the ways in which localized human populations imagine their worlds in terms of, but also in spite of, their material circumstances.

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For Who Knows Tomorrow, Tayou presents a new iteration of his Afrodiziak…Aphrozidiaque…Afrosisiaque (2001/2003)—an installation of flags of the 54 African nations—at the Neue Nationagalerie building. This work, originally created in response to the formation of the African Union, is a critical commentary on the historical, cultural and political imperatives that result in the creation of supra-national states in the wake of the establishment of the European Union and the ensuing debate about European identity and citizenship. A crucial part of this installation is made up of several life-size, polychrome sculptures inspired by African "colon” sculptures—figural portraits made by African artists representing Europeans during the colonial period. Tayou thus meditates on the complex ways Europeans figured, often as the inscrutable other, in the African ritual, visual and social imaginary.

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