World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou
gives us a large-scale immersive environment that combines the artist's sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks. Assembled from a stunning diversity of materials and found objects, Tayou’s art is characterized by an aesthetic of accumulation. He pierces Styrofoam with thousands of pins and razor blades, stacks hundreds of birdhouses against a wall, and adorns crystal glass figures with beads, plastic flowers, and feathers. This approach derives in part from the ways African sculpture is empowered with accumulations of materials to assert various kinds of religious, social, and political authority. Tayou uses this aesthetic to raise searching questions about inequalities of wealth and power in today’s postcolonial, global context at the same time he explores the hidden, spiritual forces that infuse ordinary, everyday life in African cities.
Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon, and lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.