Animal
2008 - Painting (Painting)
41 x 61 cm
Goddy Leye
Strongly influenced by history and memory, Goddy Leye’s paintings are based primarily on stories and mythologies. Containing ideas, emotions, and sensibilities, signs and symbols occupy an important place in Leye’s work, though he has to retrieve them from an interrupted history. The painting Animal was made in reference to an important precolonial kingdom, Bamun. The work takes part in an act of revindication of significant and complex societies that existed in Africa before the colonial fact. The Kingdom of Bamum (1394–1884) was a pre-colonial Central African state in what is now northwest Cameroon. It was founded by the Bamun, an ethnic group from northeast Cameroon. Its capital was the ancient walled city of Fumban. Historical texts also mention Rifum, which was a kingdom given to a son of the Bamun dynasty, apparently inciting some dispute over succession. This occurred immediately before the German colonization of this area Cameroon, at which time, the Bamun had a rich visual and performative culture, that Leyes attempts to reclaim in his work. Leyes’s painting attempts to reclaim an interrupted tradition, and at the same time it suggests making art as methodological assessment. The artist’s labor begins, in effect, with an evaluation of the tools, means, and projects of art within a social context transformed by colonialism and by latter currents, influences, and fashions from abroad. The meeting of different cultural universes is assumed in the painting through a reflection written about vodun cosmology (a West African religion). The painting becomes the fetish (hence the title) inhabited by the spirits.
Born in 1965 in Mbouda (Cameroun), Goddy Leye was an artist, a teacher, a cultural activist and a curator based in Douala (Cameroun). He studied African literature at the University of Yaoundé and co-founded the Prim’Art and Dreamers collectives. In 2002, he created ArtBakery, an experimental art initiative established in Bonendalé that encouraged the development of contemporary art and artistic practice in Cameroon and in Central Africa. In his multidisciplinary art practice, Goddy Leye showed a strong interest for history and for memory as places for subjectivity, working primarily with stories, myths, signs and symbols. In 2006, he initiated the Exit Tour – a journey from Douala to the Dak’Art Biennale with 6 other artists. His work has been exhibited in various art venues (Centre Pompidou in Paris, Galerie Peter Herrmann in Berlin, Johannesburg Art Gallery in Johannesburg, l’Appartement 22 in Casablanca, etc.), biennials (Karachi, São Paulo, Dakar) and a solo exhibition of his latest works took place at Doual’art in 2012. He died in 2011 Bonendale, Cameroon. A retrospective of his work entitled “Exit Goddy Leye” wa organized in Cameroon from November 8th to December 15th, 2021 under the initiative of Samuel Pasquier, director of the French Institute in Douala, curated by Viviane Maghela. In a conversation about video art with Goddy Leye, he pointed out that he was one of the first artists to introduce the medium at the Dakar Biennale and recalled the reservations that some people had expressed about an art form that is now known to be very much in evidence in Africa. His pioneering role does not stop there. He is also one of the first African artists to have known how to use the Internet as a platform for display and exchange. It is through this medium that I discovered, in the early 2000s, the Dreamers, a collective of Cameroonian artists that he had helped found in 1998. From Bessengue City (2002) to ArtBakery (2003), his work has been constantly placed under the sign of a multidisciplinary, collaborative and transcultural practice. He is also one of the first African visual artists to have envisioned the crossing of the borders of our continent as a creative act. In 2006, the Exit Tour took him, Ginette Daleu, LucFosther Diop, Justine Gaga, Dunja Herzog, Achille Ka and Alioum Moussa from Douala to Dakar by public transport. Two months during which Lagos, Cotonou, Lomé, Accra, Ouagadougou and Bamako were the stages of a final destination: the Dakar Biennale. – Excerpt from a text by Christine Eyene written for a monographic exhibition of Goddy Leye at Galerie Nationale, Dakar, May 13, 2012
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