Toguo barthelemy biography examples

They recall, in their way, the daily evolution of our contemporary history, crisscrossed as it is with the forced displacements of all the refugees around the globe, risking their very lives to make the journey to a livable world. A distant echo of the slave trade, perhaps? What is certain is that they are a sign of all the dangerous trajectories taken by the men, women and children fleeing war, famine, poverty and environmental disasters.

The Louvre Pyramid becomes the glass case in which these conspicuously ownerless bundles float. Clustered around a flexible central mast, they form a rescue ladder the artist sets against the nightmare of history from which he cannot wake. He now splits his time between Paris and Bandjoun Station, where he promotes other ways of being, dialogue between the arts of the global North and South, and the giving back to the African continent of that which has been consistently stolen from it.

Though he does not deny the political dimension of his art, he seeks not to give us lessons, but rather a new art form responsive to the world as it affects us and outrages us. His work has also been informed by the social movements including Black Lives Matter seen in his Black Lives Always Matter [ 11 ] series and the refugee crisis seen in The Beauty of Our Voice [ 8 ] work.

Aside from the stamps found within passports Barthelemy Toguo is also inspired by post cards. This can be seen within his work in the Head Above Water series. He traveled around the world collecting these cards in order to give the people a voice. He questioned people about their life conditions, current events, wars, and about their hopes and dreams.

Later, he would go to a local post office and create a postcard and address it to himself. He would not actually mail them but would rather keep them and carry them around with him on his trips. Barthelemy Toguo has declined participation in exhibitions because of political views. Such as the time in when he declined the invitation to join the Venice Biennale.

With my private initiative, Bandjoun Station in Cameroon, and the artistic project that accompanies it, I wanted to take on my responsibilities as a man and an artist by offering another model and reference. Under no circumstances whatever should my name be associated with that of Sindika Dokolo or the collection that he has put together over the years.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikidata item. Cameroonian painter. With his installation Mamadou Airlines, the artist presents a cluttered runway on which the airplanes are stuck. The idea here is to show that the West gladly takes in natural resources from the Third World but far fewer numbers of people from there.

Toguo barthelemy biography examples

Indeed, his native country possessed neither museum nor art school before the artist himself decided to found in the Institute of Visual Arts in Bandjoun. Devoted to the full range of art disciplines, the institute, which is currently under construction, will make it possible to host exhibitions, informal gatherings, workshops and even residencies for artists.

Recently, the artist has turned his attention to the realm of the stage and the theatrical arrangement of space. At the Lyon biennial in , for example, he showed Unfinished Theater, which combined wood sculpture, inscriptions, photographs and video. In at the Palais de Tokyo, a site for the contemporary arts, he put together several theatrical settings under the general title of The Sick Opera.

For Toguo, we are all actors, each of us playing a pre-established role in society. His installations are but a reflection of life while his work is life.