Collective Exhibition AFRIQUES, ARTISTES D’HIER ET D’AUJOURD’HUI

AFRIQUES, ARTISTES D’HIER ET D’AUJOURD’HUI

Collective work co-published by the Fondation Clément and the Fondation Dapper

The Fondation Clément has joined forces with the Dapper Foundation to welcome the exceptional creativity of artists who, past and present, demonstrate the wealth of a pluralist Africa. Neither Martinique, nor indeed the Caribbean more widely, have hosted an event of this type and scale before.

What do a Fang figure from Gabon, a Dogon couple from Mali or a Dan mask from the Ivory Coast tell us? How to artists with connections to ancestral cultures now view a pluralist Africa and explore its transformations?

These questions are at the heart of this book published to accompany the exhibition organised by the Dapper Foundation at the Clément Foundation (Martinique).

Dedicated to ancient arts, the first part of the book uses major works from the Dapper Foundation to demonstrate the connection between aesthetics and the roles assigned to objects in their societies: to communicate with spirits, to protect, to cure, to announce a birth, for the assumption of power, funerary rituals or to accompany an initiation.

The second part illustrates approaches whereby sculptures, paintings, photographs, photomontages and collages are used by talented artists to probe collective memory, explore religions and rites, appropriate an ultimately shared history or declare their place in a world marked by diversity.