The artwork features a striking ceramic sculpture of a salamander or newt. The creature's body is rendered in shiny black, while its skin is decorated with vibrant patterns of red, orange, and yellow spots, giving it a captivating and almost fantastical appearance. The sculpture's intricate details and textured surface suggest a meticulous craftsmanship. This contemporary piece may be a commentary on the fragility and beauty of nature, inviting the viewer to appreciate the unique characteristics of this amphibious creature. ...
Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Collecting the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity and race. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions and philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction. These apparently heterogeneous discourses and iconographies are marshalled together in an effort to re- appropriate History while speculating on not-yet-determined space-times – interstitial worlds where systems of perception and naming of fixed (id)entities no longer operate. From there, Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities. ...
