The Beautiful Beast

2009 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
4:37 minutes

In Goddy Leye’s installation work The Beautiful Beast , a video is projected onto a gold-colored wooden box filled with sesame seeds. The sesame seeds look like pixels underneath the video, suggesting the texture of animation. The artist portrays a strange man who writhes on the ground like a beast against this ‘pixelated’ field. The box is positioned so that the viewer looks down upon the man. The viewer has no other context for the man, except that his facial expression communicates a visually ambiguous emotion that could be interpreted as either pain or pleasure, distress or excitement, which produces a troubling image. Audio excerpts from director Fritz Lang’s 1927 M plays in waves. M is a classic German film about the hunt for a serial killer who preys on children. In the audio excerpts that Leye selected from this film, two voices argue over treating the man (in this context, the man in Leye’s work) with care and empathy. An earlier four-channel version of The Beautiful Beast (2002), features the same character performing a dance projected onto the floor, unaware of a shouting crowd, the audio for which was also taken from Lang’s film. In a concurrent audio excerpt, a lawyer and a prosecutor respectively defend and condemn the man’s performance. In more recent installments, such as at the Dakar Biennale Leye merged the visuals of the single-channel version with the audio for the four-channel version.

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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