Meschac Gaba Exhibition

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

poster for Meschac Gaba Exhibition

This event has ended.

The gallery presents its exhibition with Meschac Gaba, the artist’s first one-person gallery presentation in the United States.

Living between the Netherlands and Benin, his birthplace in West Africa, Gaba has investigated the concept of cultural identity along with exchanges between Africa and the Western world for more than fifteen years. At once critical and lighthearted, his work challenges codes of identity and systems of value by playfully renegotiating relationships between first and third worlds, the local and the global, art and the everyday.

Building on his work since the late-1990s, Gaba’s new installations and sculptures in this show bring together familiar and symbolic objects such as devalued currency, national flags and interactive table games in evocative displays of cultural hybridity, collaboration and new forms of exchange. Together, these works offer an alternative to established world systems and hierarchies – a hopeful, yet at times sobering outlook on our shared future.

Born in Cotonou, Benin in 1961, Gaba studied at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (1996-1997). Since then, his work has been included in major exhibitions worldwide including the 50th Venice Biennial (2003), Documenta 11 (2002), and the Liverpool Biennial (2010). In 2013, Tate Modern acquired and exhibited his major installation, Museum of Contemporary African Art (1997-2002), a project consisting of twelve interactive “rooms” of a nomadic museum. Other recent presentations include his traveling solo exhibition Museum of Contemporary African Art & More, Museum de Paviljoens, Almere, the Netherlands; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany; Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas, Canary Islands, 2009-2010, Station to Station, a traveling public art project organized by Doug Aitken, 2013 (group), When Attitudes Became Form Become Attitudes: A Restoration / A Remake / A Rejuvenation / A Rebellion, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Michigan, 2012-2013 (group), and Intense Proximity: La Triennale 2012, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2012 (group).

Media

Schedule

from April 26, 2014 to June 07, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-04-26 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Meschac Gaba

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