Writer and editor Keely Skinners reviews Pélagie Gbaguidi’s ‘The Colours are the Bark’ at Goodman Gallery Cape Town.
The Dakar-born, Brussels-based, Beninese artist describes herself as a “contemporary griot,” that is, a storyteller, a praise-poet, an intermediary between past and present, material and eternal. In West Africa, the griot is traditionally a cross between an epic poet, a singer-musician and a folk historian. Gbaguidi’s tools are not instruments but charcoal, coloured pencil, pastel and paint. Nevertheless, her work operates at the intersection of history and proverb. The cruelty of colonialism is her subject, but it is constellated in the cosmic realm of folktale and fate. Take 'A qui ai-je vendu mon scalpe (Who did I sell my scalp to)' as an example. From a distance, this painting is near-unintelligible. Looking closer, however, pieces of a narrative begin to emerge. A woman’s heel. A grimace. A tongue the colour of a plum. Reels of film. Puzzle pieces. Neckties without faces. The work was inspired by a trip to the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amérindiens in Marseille, France, which boasts a major collection of shrunken heads. From this gruesome encounter with human remains trapped as oddities in a European institution, Gbaguidi extrapolated an epic, atmospheric tale about bodies violated, bodies dispersed, bodies cut and cropped like images, exchanged and discarded like objects.
