Pascale Marthine Tayou’s installations are places where imagination, history, economics and spirituality co-exist, in his words creating “a bridge between thinking and dreaming.”1

The World Falls Apart, Tayou’s new work created for this exhibition and shown at the Whitworth, is an interior forest that spills out into the neighbouring park. Taking inspiration from one of the most widely-read novels in African literature, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achibe, Tayou’s installation is a “cultural traffic jam”2. African sculptures made for the tourist market peer down from wooden poles, steel diamonds hang from chains and translucent forms stuffed with discarded food packaging and crowned with wigs are suspended overhead. The distinction between trade goods and sacred objects is blurred, the diamonds look like objects of veneration as much as symbols of Africa’s plundered material wealth. Cultural definitions are indistinct and impossible, the trees are squared and unnatural, and the forest is haunted by numbers and chains.

At Manchester Art Gallery, Tayou’s Poupées Pascale and Les Sauveteurs Gnang Gnang (Femelle + Mâle) populate the ledges of neo-classical architecture and the historic galleries of Victorian art. Playing with conceptions of African art, the figures are also Tayou’s own exploration of the enduring fascination and power that fetishes possess: “[C]arving masks and statues in crystal is my last chance to see into the ‘mystery of Fetishes’, but I have been waiting to do that ever since my first sculpture. I can’t penetrate the African mask which, in spite of my efforts, seems endlessly unfathomable.”3.

The ‘dolls’ are also embroiled in global everyday life, festooned and occasionally smothered with what Tayou has described as “contemporary objects taken from the modern fetishism”4. They are adorned with cable ties, key rings, plastic bags, brightlycoloured beads, brushes and plastic knives; the ubiquitous and omnipresent products of gift shops, thrift stores and airports the world over.

Tayou’s weightless combinations of the spiritual and the prosaic, the serious and the comical are analogous to the daily experience of lived life. “I always see my exhibitions as a mixture of salt and sugar. It’s life. You’re always happy and then sad afterwards, and it starts again and there’s harmony – a bit of light and a bit of darkness.”5

1 Pascale Marthine Tayou in conversation with Bryony Bond April 2012.

2 Ibid.

3 Pascale Marthine Tayou as quoted in Always All Ways 24/02 – 15/5/2011 Press Release, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.

4 Pascale Marthine Tayou as quoted in Pascale Marthine Tayou: Le Grand Sorcier de Utopie, Gli Ori, 2009, p. 187.

5 Pascale Marthine Tayou as quoted in Always All Ways 24/02 – 15/5/2011 Press Release, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon.

Biography

Born in 1966 in Cameroon. Lives and works between Cameroon and Belgium.

Recent solo shows include Black Forest, MUDAM, Luxembourg; Always All Ways (tous les chemins mènent à …) MACLyon, Lyon 2011
– Malmö Konsthall, Sweden 2010; Traffic Jam, Gare Saint Sauveur, Lille, France 2010; Transgressions, Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy 2010; KIOSK Royal, KIOSK, Gent, Belgium 2008.

Recent group shows include, 4th Marrakech Biennale, Marrakech, Morocco 2012; Le Musée – Monde, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France, 2011; Beijing Online Inlive – 10 Hands 100 Fingers, Galleria Continua, Beijing, China 2011; The New Décor, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia, 2010; 53rd Venice Biennale 2009; Un certain état du monde?, Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia 2009; Altermodern, 4th Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London, UK, 2009; Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany 2002.

Works in the show

The World Falls Apart
2012
Remix media

Les Sauveteurs Gnang Gnang (Femelle)
2011

mixed media: crystal, wood, cowrie, tissue

165 × 70 × 60 cm
Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin
Photo by: Alicia Luxem

Les Sauveteurs Gnang Gnang (Mâle)
2011

mixed media: crystal, wood, cowrie, tissue

200 × 60 × 60 cm
Courtesy: GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin
Photo by: Alicia Luxem