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BOOMERANG: Pascale Marthine Tayou 24 june — 20 SEPT ’15 Wherever he finds himself – in his home country of Cameroon, in his studio in Ghent or working on the installation of an international group exhibition – Pascale Marthine Tayou takes a careful look around him and forges links with his immediate environment. He collects material, integrates it into his oeuvre and imbues it with new meaning in concise, poetic arrangements. The title of this exhibition is BOOMERANG, referring both to an object that returns to its source and to the consequences of human activities which threaten to strike us head on. Individual and community, and the local and the global, come together in his work. Through his art, Tayou enters into a personal relationship with the world: the continents, the country, the city, the neighbourhood, the street, the house and the studio in which he operates. His extrovert art makes all manner of connections between the inner and the outside world. Or as Tayou himself puts it: “I make art because I think about the world. I ask myself who we are, what we are doing and what the consequences are for humanity. That is BOOMERANG.” As viewers, we are also drawn into this. “We are all boomerangs.” In order to articulate his approach, Tayou has invented a new ‘ism’: taudism. A taudis is a dirty place, a space that is poorly maintained. It can either be a house, an institution or a person. Relationships between people are often dirty, too. For Tayou, taudism is an attempt to impose order on the world, on the houses we live in, and also on himself. A visit to BOOMERANG is like going through a purification ritual.
This visitor’s guide throws Tayou’s boomerang up into the air six times. We divide his work into themes: ‘gender’, ‘tradition vs globalisation’, ‘ecology’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘conflict’. In each case we provide further explanations and illustrate them with works that you can view in the exhibition. We round off with ‘fashion’, which, along with contemporary art, is a central theme at BOZAR this summer. The division into themes has been done somewhat artificially, because almost all Tayou’s works address multiple themes simultaneously. Furthermore, the works are not ordered in this sequence at the Centre for Fine Arts. Take a look around for yourself, make your own connections and whatever you do, don’t forget to intercept the boomerang along the way. Enjoy yourself!
GENDER Pascale Marthine was born as Jean Apollinaire Tayou, but changed his first name to Pascale Marthine in the midnineties. Pascale and Marthine are the names of his parents. By feminising his name, the artist is playing with the perceived boundaries of gender. This collective term encompasses all the social and cultural characteristics of men and women, and all the non-biological characteristics within a society that determine whether you are a man or a woman. His feminised artist’s name makes you stop and think about the preconceptions that colour your gaze when you visit an exhibition by a female artist. These preconceptions do not generally correspond to what you actually see. From this, you can divine that inequality between men and women is not a natural construct, but a social one. Since stereotypes can differ from culture to culture and from age to age, you can also adjust them. By changing his name, the artist reveals how fickle a preconception can be.
1 Scene of Life, 2010
Miniature figures from Tayou’s wonderful world populate these showcases like butterflies. Every one of the couples is having sex; men with women or men with
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men. They switch roles and touch not only one another, but also the boundaries of their sexuality. The artist displays the bronze couples behind glass, and his aim is not to be provocative but to illustrate the poetry of love and everything that goes with it.
2 Graffiti Neon, 2015
These erotic scenes depicted in neon look as though they have been hastily scrawled like graffiti, but unlike your average graffiti artist, Tayou has no desire to communicate a critical message. By exhibiting a warmblooded subject in a chilly neon light, he adds a touch of tenderness and humour to a forgotten space.
TRADITION VS GLOBALISATION Traditional objects often make an appearance in this exhibition as fetish statues or African masks. If you take a closer look, you will recognise traditional shapes, but you can see that the objects are not fashioned from traditional materials. The artist replaces wood with glass, nails and goat’s blood with beads and plastic. He disconnects the masks and images from their traditional context and gives them a contemporary twist.
3 Africonda, 2014
Four masks with crystal eyes stare out at you from their twisted nest. Tayou’s interwoven snake is called Africonda and symbolises Africa. Its soft, candy-coloured body is stuffed with hay and exudes a sweet, earthy smell. It is reminiscent of the exotic Africa that is depicted in romantic films and documentaries. In the meantime, dark reality glides in through the hard wooden spikes that we see emerging from beneath the snake. “The work is not that cheerful, because the snake is eating its own tail”, explains the artist. This is an allusion to the eternal cycle of life in which everything returns, problems included.
4 Poupées Pascale, 2011
The artist goes in search of his African roots in the series Poupées Pascale. His ancestors would have decorated these figurines as part of rituals to heal the sick. He replaces the organic materials used in traditional decorations with coloured beads, plastic straws and kitchen equipment. The sculptures are the perfect example of what the French Antillean writer Édouard Glissant described as ‘creolisation’. Glissant used this term to explain that mixing the visual languages of different cultures creates unexpected creative strengths.
5 Colourful Line, 2014
In a jumble of brightly-coloured straws, Colourful Line writhes above your head. This sumptuous plastic cloud is reminiscent of a birthday party that has got out of hand, but the reality is different. By gluing straws together, Tayou draws a crooked line in the exhibition space. He asks himself what would happen if you were to join up a single line, interweave it with itself and let it collide. In this work, the line symbolises the border that is drawn between regions, countries or people. Tayou shows how pliable and relative a line can be.
6 Our Traditions, 2015
In amongst the plaited branches, you recognise objects that frequently reappear in the artist’s oeuvre: diamonds, crystal masks, fetish statues and disposable objects. Every household in Africa has a broom like these and you can also buy them for a euro at Belgian markets. This installation is especially interesting if you are unfamiliar with the traditional materials. Through the eyes of the Western viewer, the branches take on a different meaning. Banal brooms are transformed into artworks, and a cheap product becomes more valuable.
ECOLOGY Using humour and powerful imagery, Tayou expresses his concern for the great problems of the 21st century. Ecology is a striking presence in his work, especially the harmful influence that humans have on nature, and his engagement with these issues is expressed time and again in his art. He presents troubling figures about
pollution, and depicts the dark side of petroleum. When it comes to his choice of materials, Tayou’s passion for ecology is plain to see. If you look closely at his installations, you can make out plastic bags, used packaging, disposable items and found objects. The material speaks for itself. These are worthless objects that have been abandoned on the side of the road or are caught up in trees. Tayou uses them to create artworks and imbues them with an economic and ideological value. By saving materials that are normally disposed of, he attacks both our consumption-based society and our throwaway culture.
7 Citarum River, 2015
Rows of plastic bottles hang from the wall like a maze. They are transparent but not invisible, and you cannot find your way out of this labyrinth. The work is named after the Citarum River in Java, one of the most polluted rivers in the world. Each day, 2000 factories discharge dangerous quantities of lead, mercury, arsenic and other toxins into the water. The artist raises a difficult question: the local people need both the factory and the river to survive. This makes them both complicit in the river’s pollution and the victims of industry. In both cases, their fate is thrown back in their faces, like a boomerang.
8 Octopus, 2010
The form of Octopus can already be recognised from afar, with the petrol pump hoses hanging from the main body reminiscent of octopus tentacles. The long tubes are forcefully plaited together to form the beating heart of a jet-black creature. But this driving force of war and pollution conceals a dark message: the process of building up a civilisation goes hand in hand with its downfall.
EXPO
For Tayou, exhibiting is also about recreating. He sees the Centre for Fine Arts as a giant casserole in which he is preparing his exhibition from scratch, using a variety of herbs and a few new ingredients in slightly different configurations. His work boils over from the normal exhibition circuit into the corridors and central hall, and right up to the main entrance in Ravensteinstraat. In the rotunda, he is exhibiting a work that he has created especially for this exhibition: Bring Back Our Boys and Girls bq , spelled out in neon letters. The moment you enter the main exhibition, a world of associations opens up. The materials used in this exhibition are strikingly modest: recycling, existing African sculptures, masks, textiles, chocolate, crystal, and so on. And be sure to look at the way the materials have been adapted and combined. Tayou appropriates objects and raw materials in order to draw attention to and question the meanings that are ingrained in them.
Tayou juxtaposes the theme of tradition with the theme of globalisation, and barriers between societies, cultures and economies fall away. Thanks to contemporary media, we can communicate effortlessly with the other side of the world. After graduating, the artist travelled across borders, journeying from Cameroon to Stockholm, Paris and Belgium. Each time he moved on, he took something with him and left part of himself behind. He also crosses borders in his art. Tayou enlarges miniature images of African flâneurs or strollers a hundred times and dresses them in Western clothing.
9 Oléoduc, 2015
The waste water pipe used in this work weaves its way innocently through the exhibition space. This piece of plumbing takes a dramatic turn when the artist adds statistics to it that detail the most polluted places in the world. Tayou confronts you with the fact that poor countries suffer far more from environmental pollution than rich ones.
bk Plastic Tree, 2014
As you walk round the exhibition you have to zigzag between small trees that grow downwards from the ceiling. The leaves have been replaced by brightly coloured plastic bags. This work shows how the consumer society of the West is adversely affecting the ecological balance. It takes twenty years for nature to decompose a plastic bag. In the course of that time small particles of plastic end up in the food chain. These microplastics are a danger to man, animals and the environment. The ominous message conveyed by Plastic Tree is at odds with its lively, cheerful form.
COLONIALISM Tayou challenges Europe’s colonial past. In both the form his work takes and the materials he uses, you discover direct references to exploitation, slavery and all that is inextricably linked to Africa’s history. Reading between the lines, you discern three primary motivations for European colonisation. Political: every country wanted to own the largest piece of territory; economic: they all wanted to get their hands on as many markets, raw materials and workers as possible; naively humanitarian:
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