Galerie Cécile Fakhoury - Dakar is pleased to present Stasis, a solo exhibition by Togolese artist Sadikou Oukpedjo. 

 

After « Anima » and « Silentium », two major exhibitions in Sadikou Oukpedjo's career, the artist here continues with « Stasis »  a cycle of reflections and plastic experiments on the place of Humans in the world. The artist's outlook on our contemporary society is unmistakable: Human beings have lost themselves in a senseless race for vanities and their scale of values ​​is remarkable only for the strength of their violence. For Sadikou Oukpedjo, this first impetus, creator of collective meaning, has died out as man became detached from his environment, keeping the imperatives of his soul and the needs of his body far from his reason.

 

Rising by force, above nature which he claims to submit to his will, above animals in the name of progress and a supposed superiority of his mind, the Human being has become intoxicated with pride and excess.

 

Born in 1970 in Ketao, Togo. He lives and works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. After having developed, at a young age, an artistic practice essentially focused on sculpture and assemblies, Sadikou Oukpedjo joins in 1998 the studio of Paul Ahyi in Lome, Togo. He then creates his own studio, 15kms from the capital, in the neighbourhood of Agoe Nyeve. Out of his works, which incorporate several traditional objects that he collected, he questions his cultural heritage through the prism of contemporary issues - political abuse of power, social inequalities and religious conflicts.

 

The gesture and expressiveness of Sadikou Oukpedjo are driven by doubts and apprehensions of the world as he sees it. For him, the animal world is a source of essential questioning for man humans to find his place in our societies, at the risk to lose sight of certain values, traditions and precepts of nature. The process of questioning our deep origins finds its roots in the human need of gaining access to the knowledge of oneself, through multiple and ancestral attempts - cosmogony, rituals, sorcery, magic. Henceforth, the work of Sadikou Oukpedjo is one of them.