In his most the latest overall body of perform, Sess Essoh reanimates figures from Black African heritage in his vivid collaged canvases. Employing thread, color, and paste, Essoh’s performs embed these person histories inside a cohesive narrative room to make a collective knowing of their affect.
The artist—who was born in Toupah, Côte d’Ivoire, and received his MFA in artwork from the Nationwide Faculty of Wonderful Arts in close by Abidjan—is now making his German solo exhibit debut with “Homage” at Galerie Melbye-Konan, which is on see by March 31st. Final year, Essoh’s abstract blended-media paintings bought out at contemporary African artwork reasonable 1-54, at the booth of his gallery LouiSimone Guirandou, which co-signifies him together with Galerie Melbye-Konan. Now, in a new sequence, “Homage,” Essoh results in collages with considerable figures from Africa’s previous, adding to an alternate collective memory further than common colonial narratives.
In his painting Myriam Makeba and Queen A’ Nzinga of Angola (2022), Essoh collages printed images of two famous southern African ladies: civil legal rights activist and singer Miriam Makeba, who protested from South African apartheid and the 17th-century leader of what is now northern Angola, Queen Nzinga, renowned for her military resistance versus the Portuguese.
Employing a marouflage strategy, Essoh juxtaposes visuals of these two fantastic gals, divided by geography and generations, onto a vivid canvas dominated by pink and peach hues. Black pastel strains, scribbles, and a faceless figure overlay these collaged shots. In Essoh’s get the job done, Africa’s previous of woman resistance and insurrection is memorialized, with these forceful faces exhibiting put on and tear like concert posters.
“I obtain outdated textbooks that are no more time released,” Essoh reported very last yr. “I query society, historical past, modifications.” The artist, who is also a writer, remains fascinated by how social situations are recorded and shared globally, noting the tendency for Euro-American audiences to ignore and erase Black African histories. Finally, his paintings use quotation and every day resources to generate option narratives, rewriting Africa’s historical past as a single of rebel towards colonial oppression. Memory, he says, can be fragile.
Essoh’s curiosity in the formation of collective memory was partially affected by his father’s pattern of preserving a each day diary. For the artist, journaling is a way of ritually reinterpreting daily life by recording it—this motivated him to use social imagery, narrative, and histories in his artwork to make feeling of a personal come across.
