Aljana Moons II

Alexis Peskine’s work explores the Black experience and has been featured in many publications and prestigious newspapers such as the New York Times, Le Monde, O Correio da Bahia and Libération. Early in his life, Peskine was exposed to questions of identity: one grandfather, Boris, a Jewish engineer, survived a concentration camp while his other grandfather Antonio, an AfroBrazilian carpenter, raised his family in the inner city of Salvador, Brazil. Peskine’s signature works are large-scale mixed media portraits rendered three-dimensionally by painstakingly and accurately hammering nails of different sizes to treated wooden planks.

Aljana Moons is a series of four photographs and a short film that explores masculinity, youth and fatherhood in contemporary Senegal. The visuals in this body of work sit between documentary and scifi, where footage of children dressed in astronaut suits made from tomato cans and rice bags merges with mesmerising scenes of men at work, during rituals, in celebration and amongst community. The result is a poetic visualisation of the journey from childhood to manhood.