LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan is proud to present its new group exhibition, entitled Brave New World, curated by Amédé Régis Mulin.
On view from Thursday, May 20 to Saturday, July 3, 2021, this exhibition brings together a selection of works by four Malian artists: Ange Dakouo, Alhassane Konté (Lass), Dramane Bamana and Dramane Diarra.
Ninety years ago, Aldoux Huxley alerted us to authoritarian doctrines through his dystopian novel "Brave New World". Based on an industrial and hyper-consuming organization, these doctrines imply the disrespect of nature and its systemic plundering. Despite numerous warnings, our society does not seem to react; the evolutions of the current world can unfortunately be compared to those of the dangerous universe described in Huxley's fiction.
The crises that regularly shake Mali can also be analyzed through the prism of Huxley's novel: an opposition between the world order, which claims to be civilized, and social and humanist resistance, which can be found in the historical development of the last thirty years in Mali.
The exhibition Brave New World features four young artists from Bamako who narrate a vision of their world in the midst of these struggles and offer us their poetic interpretation of an optimistic development of our society:
While Ange Dakouo intends to protect us with these woven gris-gris and to alert us to the current drifts of our societies, in the optimistic optics of a global and close change, Alhassane Konté (Lass) takes us to the jungle, a protected natural space where human societies evolve with benevolence and humanism in harmony with nature and in a form of united redemption,Dramane Bamana invites us into ironically candid social frescoes; and Dramane Diarra has fun deciphering the different forms of manipulation of which we are victims. These four artists show us what the world could be if we paid more attention to our daily behaviors, putting sharing and respect for our Earth at the center of our concerns. They offer us optimistic alternatives, convinced that our world can be reshaped according to humanistic and earth-friendly foundations.