In situ / Paraboles d'un règne sauvage, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye - Abidjan: Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

In a transformed space, aiming to disrupt the visitor's spatial landmarks, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye proposes a series of paintings, works on paper and an immersive installation, as an extension of her reflections on the political and social landscape of our contemporary societies.

To enter the Gallery, we must walk through a long dark corridor, with a low ceiling and covered with black pistols. The hands that activate them are invisible, but the victims are indeed present, their names written in blood letters: Mouhamed, Fatou, Delphine, Hans, Joseph... The immersive experience of this passage towards a destiny that one guesses to be fatal is doubled by the diffusion of a text written by Sylvain Sankaré and read by Serigne Ibrahima Dieye.

At the end of the corridor, the installation continues as a warning: hanging heads have shed their religious attributes that have fallen loose on the ground. Simulacra of hanging, we are all the same in a death that will catch up with us indiscriminately, perhaps faster if you choose dissent in this world.

Inhabiting the space of their intranquilous souls, these silhouettes ask us: what remains after death?

Often, the artist uses the animal figure to better tell the human and its wrongs as in fables, this thousand-year-old form of narrative with multiple geographies, from ancient Persia to the middle-age Mediterranean, from La Fontaine to Birago Diop.

The characters in Serigne Ibrahima Dieye's paintings and installations are ideas to which the artist has given body and substance. They are visual allegories of evils that are tearing contemporary societies apart, but not only: once on canvas, on paper, or embodied in wood, these ideas take on their autonomy and become the protagonists of a dramatic narrative whose interpretation is the responsibility of the spectators.

Here, one should not hope to enter a bubble pacified by art and beauty, nor find a solution. In each work, Serigne Ibrahima Dieye summons the chaos of the world as the subject of creation and chooses to tell us its darkest fables. Paraboles d'un règne sauvage is a dystopian plastic tale.