Pélagie Gbaguidi (CRF 2018) has joined Zeno X Gallery, located in Antwerp, Belgium. A first presentation of her work will be on view at Zeno X Gallery Antwerp South from May 12 until June 26, 2021. Pélagie Gbaguidi’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery will take place in March 2022.
Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary ‘griot’, someone who functions as an intermediary between the individual memory and the ancestral past. Her work is an anthology of the signs and traces of trauma, and is centered on colonial and postcolonial history. She draws attention to the way in which legacies of oppression are circumvented in official histories – and thus preserved. She aims to reveal the process of forgetting by re-contextualizing archives and histories. Her works are not direct representations of a traumatic past, but transmit embodied knowledge. Her paintings and drawings have a performative character and she often uses parts of her body to apply paint or pigment to the canvas. The images created by Gbaguidi through painting, drawing, performance or installation attempt to break out of binary thinking, archetypes and simplifications.
Her work is currently part of the group show ‘BXL Universel II: Multipli.City’ at CENTRALE for contemporary art in Brussels. In May she will present her installation ‘The Missing Link Dicolonisation Education by Mrs. Smiling Stone’ – which was on view at Documenta 14 – as part of ‘Congoville’ at the Middelheim museum in Antwerp. Later this year she will also take part in the Triennial of Ottignies – Louvain-la-Neuve. To contact Zeno X gallery for an appointment, click here.