DIMITRI FAGBOHOUN
INVICTUS
21/01/2021 – 27/02/2021
OPENING
21.01.2021 | 11am > 8pm
22.01.2021 | 11am > 6pm
23.01.2021 | 11am > 6pm
5 Rue Saint Georges, 1050 Ixelles.
« Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate :
I am the captain of my soul »
For his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Dimitri Fagbohoun explores the theme of resilience in the context of the Belgian colonial History.
Invictus is inspired by the eponymous poem, he retains its sacred character, a recurring theme in his work, and above all its profound meaning, which invites resilience.
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Dimitri Fagbohoun was born in July 1972 to a Beninese father and a Ukrainian mother in Cotonou, Benin.
Having grown up in Cameroon before moving to France, where he now lives and works, the themes and questions he has been working on for many years have been the subject of his work. The approach is a reflection of its journey and its history, straddling geographical and artistic boundaries. His work is thus inseparable from its own experience, its plural identity. Protean, by the heterogeneous forms that it takes.
He uses, video, photography, installation, he expresses a relationship to identities and history in which his writing disturbs the models that make them up.
Since 2015, he has been questioning classical (African) works of art that have influenced Western art or thought. In 2017, for this project: « recollection », he was awarded the Smithsonian Fellowship Award from the Smithsonian National Museum of
African Art in Washington D.C. He has just won a competition for his first monumental work and his first public procurement.