FERNAGU – POLARIS
Harald Fernagu (born in 1970 in Cherbourg, France) is not directly interested by african art.
Coming from the assesment that the consequences of the colonial period on our everyday life were too often ignored, the artist has been for the past few years questioning himself on an identity troubled by an impose filiation.
It is from those objects of rituals and cult that the artist defines as « coming from contemporary African touristic trade « that he models their shapes. By pairing, layering and adding other objets from this « touristic art », he then dresses them with shells or seed nails.
With those sculptures, Harald Fernagu offers to decolonise stereotypes. Here, no beautiful statues but skeletons bending to the artist’s reinterpretation. Shapes make way for lines, the narration allows to fill in the blanks of history, or to suggest a new reading of it.
A dialogue is then created between a formal esthetique that belongs to the codes of globalise contemporay art, and another esthetique belonging to tribal arts created for a certain proximity.
Furthermore, an exchange between the art pieces and the spectator occurs. Through the reactualisation of the question of appropriation and it’s legitimity, the piece conjugates in the present. The spectator gives life to the object and allows it to get out of it’s past museal representation. The public can then see behind Harald Fernagu’s open humor, a falsely authentic or a real fake touristic sculpture. Rather than to create a God, the artist from his own words »suggests the ritual that serves him, invites the spectator’s body to feel it by building objects touchable in their plasticity and their look ». It is with benevolence that the objects are being reincarnated with a newly found strengh.
Thus with the exhibition Dogon’s Hypothesis, Harald Fernagu does not only suggests a new view point, but also a new eye.
Vernissage in the artist’s presence Thursday 21 November from 4 PM to 8.30 PM
And Saturday 24 November from 3 PM to 8.30 PM