Urban Requiem

Barthelemy Toguo
Born in M’Balmayo, Republic of Cameroon, in 1967.
He lives and works in Paris, France; Bandjoun,
Cameroon; and New York City, USA .

Barthelemy Toguo’s practice is inspired by his experiences traveling and living among different world cultures. Born in Cameroon, he was trained as an artist in Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Grenoble, France; and Dusseldorf, Germany. Toguo’s work incorporates the diasporic condition as fundamental to contemporary reality. Fittingly, he has chosen the shamrock as his trademark. Although the shamrock derives from Christian iconography, in Toguo’s hands it becomes a silhouette of the artist or represents the threefold routes of his intellectual and artistic practice. It also alludes to Toguo’s playful lyricism and his search for equilibrium in the world. Toguo’s commitment to making the world a better place is not limited to art-making alone. In 2013 he founded Bandjoun Station, an artist-in-residency program in the highlands of West Cameroon. The foundation hosts a permanent collection, enables artistic exchange, and promotes agricultural initiatives in the spirit of sustainable development.
Employing sculpture, installation, performance, photography and film, drawing and watercolor, Toguo’s versatility is impressive. His use of watercolor is characterized by subtlety and playfulness, while his skillfully applied layers of liquid pigment merge animals with human figures. He often represents humans and animals only by their limbs and body parts, which speak of violence and isolation. In these examples, the wholeness of the body is replaced by a postmodern fragmentation, a body that is amputated, deformed, penetrated, and stressed.
Drawing from his earlier works, his installation Urban Requiem showcases Toguo as a wood sculptor and printer. Rather than borrowing from African traditions, he sculpts his expansive installations using a chainsaw, which allows him to work quickly. In this installation, gigantic wooden rubber stamps that resemble life-size human busts are arranged like toppled heads on triangular shelves. Whereas earlier versions of his woodcut prints on paper (such as Immigration Officer, Type of Visa, and Department of Foreign Affaires) testified to the logic of border politics that have marked many migrating bodies, Urban Requiem follows a more universal approach. Using slogans used in protests, such as “I am a man,” “Our unarmed son,” or “We want a murder charge!,” the artist commemorates the voices of those suffering from injustice in the world.