The artwork depicts a dark wooden structure resembling a jail cell or enclosure, with a large window-like opening in the center framing a portrait of a human face. The somber tones and the grid-like pattern of the wooden bars create a sense of confinement and imprisonment, while the centralized portrait suggests a symbolic representation of the human condition. The artist's use of contrasting elements, such as the warm wood and the stark, uncompromising portrait, suggests a commentary on themes of identity, power, and the complexities of the human experience. ...
Dimitri Fagbohoun was born in 1972 from a Beninese father and an Ukrainian mother, in Cotonou, Benin. Being raised in Cameroon before settling in France, where he lives and works now, the thematics and questions he raises are reflecting his course and history, between geographic and artistic borders. His work is then inseparable of his own life experience and of his plural identity.
Protean, by the heterogeneous forms he uses, video, photography, installation, he expresses a relationship to identity and personal history within which his writing is disturbing the models that constitute them. From this tension results the emerging of other visions and new forms. As he conceives his artistic work to be an open field of propositions, his use of video, between experimentation and cinematographic form, goes to the limit of cinema and visual arts, changing the frontiers between those practices.
He documents the notions he explores, thus producing mental representations of the visual territories he created. Many of his videos are linked to sound creations and exhale a quasi schizophrenic dimension of the thematics he deals with : identity, memory, religion, politics. ...
Galerie Cecile Fakhoury opened its doors in Abidjan, Ivory Coast in September 2012. In May 2018, the gallery inaugurated its second space in Dakar, Senegal and a showroom in Paris, France. Shortly after, in March 2020, a new project space dedicated to emerging artists from Africa opened in Abidjan. In October 2021, Galerie Cecile Fakhoury inaugurated another gallery, opening in the 8th arrondissement of Paris on Avenue Matignon. The gallery promotes contemporary art from Africa and the Diaspora by providing visibility to the artistic diversity and creative spirit from the continent. Through its programming of solo and group exhibitions, participation in international art fairs, biennales, and collaboration with international galleries, Cecile Fakhoury is a leading force putting contemporary African art on the global map. The artists represented by the gallery are distinguished by their cultural identities and stories, they create a new language that crosses geographical boundaries and familiarities. They are observers of the world they live in, critics of society, and committed to their positions living within complex histories. In turn, they ask us to reconsider our own relation to the world. ...
