thierry oussou soil
gastcurator ashley swagers
10 september 2017 - 8 oktober 2017
On September 10, the project ’to remind you’ starts at Bradwolff Projects. The project consists of three consecutive solo exhibitions by the artists Thierry Oussou (Allada, Benin), Aliansyah Caniago (Tangerang, Indonesia), and Sefer Memisoglu (Istanbul, Turkey). The presentations are being carried out in collaboration with curators Ashley Swagers, Christine van den Bergh, and Sanneke Huisman during the period from September to mid-December 2017. Through these presentations and the accompanying fringe program, the aim is to contribute to the development of a nuanced, global, and postcolonial vision, zooming in on both the Dutch colonial past and the Dutch multicultural present.
For his solo exhibition at Bradwolff Projects, Thierry Oussou has developed a site-specific installation titled Soil. Soil refers to the equal, universal, and layered foundation from which humanity originates and to which it shall return: the earth. At the same time, the earth has also become Oussou’s field of work, now that, following his two-year residency at the Rijksakademie, he no longer has a fixed home base but allows his work to lead him to various places around the world. From this personal, yet global, perspective, the artist operates as a social archaeologist. In his “archaeological practices,” he seeks out meaningful layers using objects, materials, human actions, and centuries-old spoken Beninese stories, making the prevailing social, historical, political, and (post)colonial power relations visible in narratives and images.
Oussou works with everyday materials such as earth, canvas, clay, wood, and particularly paper. By using these apparently banal materials within a context, they become part of an artwork, through which he refers, among other things, to the contemporary issue surrounding the presentation of ethnographic everyday objects in Western postcolonial museums. By playfully fathoming and deconstructing cultivated notions, he prompts people to question elements of the daily routine of life and aims to underscore that everything in the world is layered.
Visual artist Thierry Oussou (Benin, 1988) is self-taught. In 2014, Oussou moved from Allada/BJ to Amsterdam for a two-year artist in residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. He has exhibited at Juliette Jongma (NL), Cargo in Context (NL), Holbaek Museum (DK), No Man’s Art Gallery (NL), and the Dak’art Biennale (SN), among others. In 2016, Oussou was nominated for the Royal Prize for Fine Arts.
Ashley Swagers (Netherlands, 1988) is a graduate art historian. With her own culturally diverse background and deep-rooted interest in the colonial past and postcolonial present, she delves into the ways in which artists reflect on this theme. As Oussou’s work also emphasizes, she believes that the different layers of the postcolonial narrative can be read in elements of the present. “Oussou’s work is visually very powerful and tells a different layer of the story depending on the context.”