Assoukrou Aké

Assoukrou Aké is a multidisciplinary artist, who freely explores different plastic forms ranging from installation to sculpture, including engraving and textile works, to develop what he calls 'a healing story'. By confronting his personal history with 'the big story', Assoukrou is interested in what binds them together, attempting to take an empathetic and distanced look at the shadowy aspects of collective history, in order to overcome the singularities of each person to reach a mixed critical space where the fragments of individual lives could make sense again and create new solidarities. Assoukrou Aké's universe is made up of multiple references, interweaving African mythology and iconography from the Age of Enlightenment, sacred allegories, classic European literature, secular rites and press photography. It often embodies a tragic dimension, establishes an atmosphere of grandeur and evokes epics, great adventures, conquests – or their failure. Through the plastic repetition of traditional or classic forms and the subversion of contexts and hierarchies of material, Assoukrou Aké ultimately composes an art of translation, of transposition, in order to be able to confront the mutations of violence and invent a new common language, discoverer of the world and the answers that are intrinsic to it.