PAST EXHIBITION
On fait des dessins dans la terre
Curator: Eva Barois De Caevel
Naomi Lulendo
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien
Georgina Maxim
Charlotte Yonga
6 February - 10 April 2021 - Extended until 29 May 2021
-
31 PROJECT is pleased to present, in collaboration with the curator Eva Barois De Caevel, the collective exhibition On fait des dessins dans la terre, bringing together the works of the artists: Naomi Lulendo, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Georgina Maxim and Charlotte Yonga..
-
On fait des dessins dans la terre (extract)
By Eva Barois De Caevel, December 2020
This is not an exhibition submitted to a theme in charge of bringing together more or less artificially these artists but to give all its measure to a meeting by affinity and emotional. It is also to bring together a generation of artists whose work I have been observing with attention since several years and with which I have for the most partworked several times. Define what makes one feels affinities between works and artists is not always easy to theorize, or to poeticize. The affinities here are both thematic and formal. They also exist at the level of these artists, their personal narratives, their their communities.
The title of the exhibition is a loan from L'Opoponax by Monique Wittig. It is a reading that was recommended to me by female students in School of Fine Arts where I have the chance to teach. This Opoponax is what allows me to to suggest both these affinities between women (these student artists, the artists I'm talking about in my classes, the worker that I am) and the formal and thematic affinities contained in the pieces: sober, modest gestures, techniques simple, the search for and enhancement of pleasure to isolate these simple gestures, to look for themselves, to find oneself there and to get lost in it, but also to consider the shapes they produce with delight. It It is also about, still at the level of these echoes of continuity between objects produced, of a continuity between objects produced and their birth or their becoming, sometimes, in the performance, of narrations that weave themselves around organic, from childhood (and even from the very young), to the childhood), maternity, matriculation and childhood), maternity, matrescence and maternal and infantile bodies, and which are deployed in the the multiplicity of mediums.
On fait des dessins dans la terre pays attention and makes one want to pay attention, I hopefully, to links between women.
-
Artist's biographies
Naomi Lulendo
Lives and works in Dakar, Senegal.
Born in Paris, Naomi Lulendo lives and works in Dakar. In her multidisciplinary practice between painting, sculpture, performance, photography and installation, Naomi Lulendo creates visual proposals that disturb and reinvent our relationship to space. Exploring the process of identity construction, making an analogy between body, language and architecture, her work is inspired by her personal biography and an attention to the polysemy of her environment. She explores the symbolic potentialities of the bodies, objects, patterns and forms that surround her.
She uses surfaces and patterns to create visual games with multiple references and propose an exploration of the moving links linking these bodies, forms and objects in the space where they are deployed. Naomi Lulendo shows the semiological richness of the ephemeral devices created by a given instant and space.
Naomi Lulendo is graduated of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2018, she participated in the RAW Academy research seminar under the direction of the artist Otobong Nkanga, in Dakar. Her work has been shown notably at the Galerie Allen, Paris (2019); at the 13th edition of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2018 and at the Galleria Continua in 2016.
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien
Lives and works in Paris, France and Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Visual artist, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien works in sculpture, embroidery, performance, installation and video.
She crosses forms and mediums, juxtaposes them and creates assemblages in a kind of visual cartography playing on the multiplicity of cultural references and the profusion of senses. Industrial materials such as aluminium, copper and brass meet in an unexpected cohabitation with natural elements such as raffia fibre, hair, rope, wood and shells.
Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien thus delineates spaces specific to rituals allowing her to deploy her performative practice where she strives to tell stories and poetic narratives while replaying a real and fantasized "tradition". A visual syncretism that questions her multiple identity between Ivorian and Creole culture.
Trained at Ecole des Beaux-arts de Paris – Cergy, she was selected for the 61st Salon de Montrouge in 2016. The artist has benefited from several solo exhibitions such as at the Primo Marella Gallery in Milan in 2019, at the CAC La Traverse in 2020. She also participated in the « Herstory » exhibition in 2019 at MAC VAL, the 38th International EVA Biennial in 2018, the MOCA in Brescia, Italy and at the FRAC Ile de France in 2020. Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien will exhibit in 2021 at the Orangerie du Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.
Georgina Maxim
Lies and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Georgina Maxim is known for both working as an artist and curator with over a decade of arts management and curatorial practice. In 2012, she co-founded Village Unhu, an artist-run space in Harare that provides studio spaces, exhibitions, workshops and residency programs for young and professional artists. After completing her studies at the University of Chinhoyi, she taught visual arts for several years at the Prince Edward School, while managing the Delta Gallery, a historical gallery for contemporary art in Harare.
At the same time, Georgina Maxim has developed her artistic practice by turning to textiles and using the techniques of embroidery, sewing and weaving to deconstruct, cut out and recompose second-hand clothes. Through her practice, Georgina Maxim creates unique pieces that escape any definition: the artist herself describes her work as an act of memory, a transcription of the moment, of the experiences and stories evoked by these used clothes. In 2018, Georgina Maxim has been nominated for the Henrike Grohs Award (Goethe Institute, Abidjan). Her work has been exhibited in Zimbabwe (Delta Gallery, National Gallery of Zimbabwe) and internationally (Mojo Gallery in Dubai, 31 PROJECT in Paris and Goethe Institute in Salvador de Bahia).
In 2019, Georgina Maxim presented an installation for the Zimbabwean pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. In the same year, she took a master’s degree at the University of Bayreuth to deepen her curatorial practice. She also undertook a creative residency at the Goethe Institute in Salvador de Bahia. In 2020, she exhibits at the Bargoin Museum (Clermont-Ferrand) and presents her work at the FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA in 2021, during the exhibition Memory: tales of another story.
Charlotte Yonga
Lives and works in Barcelona, Spain and Paris, France.
The French-Cameroonian artist Charlotte Yonga takes an attentive look at individuals and territories. Her approach, impregnated with dramaturgy, inherits a certain documentary tradition and is traversed by questions linked to the notion of individuality subjected to delocalization and North-South cross-examination.
The subjects she depicts, mostly "ordinary" people captured in characteristic contexts, are at the center of attention and face the viewer. In an alchemy that summons with realism, strength and fragility, Charlotte shows tangible personalities captured in their complexities.
Charlotte is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Paris-Cergy (ENSAPC). During her studies, she developed a particular attraction for portraiture and gradually favored the photographic medium. Then in a concern to move her gaze to her subjects, she explores the expressive qualities specific to other media, such as video and sound. Charlotte has also been drawing for many years, an intimate work that she has shown very little. Her drawings, made with felt pen and colored pencil, are as many "therapeutic sketches" and forms coming from the unconscious. Charlotte also documents this creative process through photography, creating a formal and narrative link between her two favourite mediums.
Her work has been presented at the Festival Circulations, Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, at Museum of Le Havre, at M.Bassy Hamburg in Germany, for the Project Space of the Casablanca Biennale in Morocco and at LagosPhoto Festival in Nigeria.