She wails and cannot be consoled, her voice tearing the air to shreds. For her children have passed through the windy Doors of No Return. Moustapha Dimé, 1952-1996, has a solo at the National Gallery, Dakar, Senegal. I think it is the highlight of the OFF Biennale at DARART 2014. I will post some images from his sculptures. His work is inventive, almost exclusively introverted, yet organically located in figurative reality in a non-rational reference--in which materiality matters more than descriptive qualities. He is a poet of found objects. His language is rigorous and fractured. Even though he locates his aesthetics around the female figure, his gaze is not romantic. The tragic quality that he brings to the female figure is schizophrenic--he adores, yet cries with a dirge phrasing recalling rituals, burials and loss. Like Senghor, he longs for a woman that does not exist, except perhaps in the lyrical imaginary. He is afraid to look at the female body. Because what he sees is a spent mother, elegantly adorned in her worn devastation. Moustapha Dimé lived on Goree Island, where the voices of the wailing women taken into captivity stay in the wind blowing through the many Doors of No Return. She wails and cannot be consoled, her voice tearing the air to shreds. For her children have passed through the windy Doors of No Return.
Posted on: Fri, 16 May 2014 12:12:10 +0000
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