Assoukrou Aké: Les graines de semences ne doivent pas être moulues

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury – Abidjan presents Les graines de semences ne doivent pas être moulues (Seed grains should not be ground), the first solo exhibition of the artist Assoukrou Aké in Abidjan.

This exhibition title is a gateway. The gateway through which Käthe Kollwitz exits the stage, as it is the title of her last lithograph. After witnessing the death of her son in the slaughter of the First World War, Kollwitz had to live through the death of her grandson in the horrors of the Second. Intimate deaths that fueled her relentless commitment against killings and killers. Seed grains should not be ground. One does not build a world on the corpses of its children. These cathedrals of bones, before building them in their own fields of wheat, Europe had scattered them to all the winds of the colonies.

This exhibition title is a gateway. The gateway through which Assoukrou Aké invites us into his theater of shadow and light. Like Kollwitz before him, it is by scratching, by scratching, by subtracting material that he brings out the vein of bodies and things. Removing is the first gesture of the engravers’ guild. Removing to reveal. And everything that has not been removed remains in the shadows. Pure surface. Full expanse. Without depth.

-Excerpt from the exhibition text by Jean-Baptiste Naudy

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