Pascale Marthine Tayo
u (Cameroon, b. 1966) Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium and in Yaoundé, Cameroon.
His works not only mediate between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. It is always closely linked to the idea of travel and of coming into contact with what is other to self, and is so spontaneous that it almost seems casual. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou have a recurrent feature in common: they dwell upon an individual moving through the world and exploring the issue of the global village.
Tayou’s works are composed through a process of accumulating heterogeneous elements. The environments created for the exhibition projects are absorbing and multi-coloured, packed with stimuli, visual prompts, thoughts, words and characters that trigger full-blown short circuits between imagination and reality. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou have a recurrent feature in common: they dwell upon an individual moving through the world and exploring the issue of the global village.
Active since the middle of the 90s, the artist has taken part in important international exhibitions and events, from Documenta 11 (Kassel, 2002) and the Münsterland Skulptur Biennale (Münster, 2003) through to the Biennal of Istanbul (2003), Lyon (2005), Venice (2005 and 2009) and Havana (2006). The artist has shown in important museums and exhibition spaces around the world (the Kunsthalle in Vienna, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Grand Palais in Paris, the SFAI of San Francisco, the Talpiot Beit Benit Congress Centre in Jerusalem, Tate Britain in London, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Toulouse and the Hayward Gallery in London), and has had solo exhibitions at: MACRO (Rome, 2004 and 2013), S.M.A.K. (Gent, Belgium, 2004), MART (Herford, Germany, 2005), Milton Keynes Gallery (Milton Keynes, UK, 2007), Château de Blandy-les-Tours (Blandy Les Tours, France, 2008), Benedengalerie Culturcentrum (Kortrijk, Belgium, 2009), the International Film Festival (Rotterdam, Holland, 2010), Malmö Konsthall (Malmö, Sweden, 2010), Gare Saint-Sauveur, lille3000 (Lille, France, 2010), Goethe Institut Johannesburg (Johannesburg, South Africa, 2010), MAC (Lyon, France, 2011), Mudam (Luxembourg, 2011), La Villette (Paris, 2013) and KUB (Bregenz, 2014), the Serpentine Sackler Gallery (London, England, 2015) and Bozar (Brussels, Belgium, 2015), Musée de l’Homme (Paris, 2015), CAC Malaga (Spain, 2016) and Bass Museum (Miami, 2017).
© Lorenzo Fiaschi
