13 November 2008
The Alliance Française Gaborone and Thapong Visual Arts Center are on Friday opening a paintings exhibition by Cameroonian artist Justice Gaga at the Alliance Francaise centre in Gaborone.
The exhibition opens at 6pm.
The exhibitor, Justice Gaga, is a Cameroonian artist who has been awarded a prize by the French cultural agency "Culturesfrance" and thereby given a grant to do an art residency in Botswana. She has been working at Thapong Visual Arts Centre for the last three months and is now presenting her work.
According to a news release from the Alliance Francaise, Gaga's hybrid human evocations are the signs of new identities, often transitory, which populate cities. Her recurrent personality searches for problems, translates her needs to understand human nature, it questions itself, and it questions us. In the urban space, it resists like its creator.
Resistance is for that matter the fundamental driving force for Gaga's art. In her installation art videos, her paintings, she denounces prejudgments and notably stereotyped images of African solidarity.
"In fact, the city of Douala that she knows very well, is the canvas of more and more loneliness, indifference and of contempt. Her artwork forces to penetrate her mental space. She creates an aesthetic that is quasi related to her enigmatic silhouette and the spectator, representing the possible connections between living beings. "My work is about the notion of solitude and connected themes such as seclusion, isolation, exile, emigration... generally this takes the form of an enigmatic figure, often all black, sometimes all black, which scours the most improbable surroundings: cellars of boats, deserted refreshment stalls... we could see in it some resemblance with Ed Hopper, who I discovered not long ago but whose work I really admire, which could have inspired mine if I had known him earlier.
This stranger very often communicates his distress and shares the weight of his load and the horizon of his hope with you," the painter says.
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