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

We can only try to guess the original shape of the sculpture which finds itself covered with shells, for which the artist kept natural colors or repaints the set in black. Here, exactly it is about forms and about origins that other countries made, in the imitation of an African continent, and ( re ) shaped by the artist. The title of my colonies  gives to the exhibition its vertebral column. The exhibition underlines the history of the true and false techniques of the African sculptures, while transforming them, recovering them partially or totally, so they become works of another world, another territory of another period.

Harald Fernagu opens new perspectives as for the real object by offering him material to a new route.

My Colonies are ready for new territories of the exotic.