Gathering is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Ndayé Kouagou (b. 1992 in Paris, France), on view from 29 November 2024 - 22 February 2025.

Evolving from self-authored texts which are then expanded upon through performance, film, textiles, sculpture and installation, Kouagou manipulates the language of aphorism espoused by online influencers and self-help gurus.

Installation Views (3 images)

Ndayé Kouagou’s work is shaped by a gentle intention-not to confront his audience, but to draw them in, inviting a surrender to the dreamscapes of his video installations. A Message for Everybody asks us to engage with the presentation on our own account.

Kouagou moves as a performer, with play as his compass and point of origin. Here, viewers drift, unguarded, into realms where reality softens, and imagination takes the helm. The artist questions the beginning and the end. The spaces we gradually enter - into within the gallery, allow us access to new places and spaces, hereby exploring the capacity of imagination beyond time and space. Kouagou carves out and claims modestly yet forcefully space with and within these works-both in body and spirit-to reveal how the “idea of Black identity,” might be unraveled by the stories we choose to tell. What you see is what you see and what we see is coded.

Selected Works (8 images)

Kouagou invites a stepping into his universe, some of his modalities of engaging with the current state of the world. It is a practice that / might characterise as neither utopic nor autonomous; it is not necessarily hopeful nor even pessimistic. It is an alternative world, engaging with that might seem futuristic but could just as well be experienced as nostalgic. Nostalgia towards an unknown ‘time’. Instead, It functions through relationality. Kouagou visually, haptically, affectively explores how you, me, we, as a viewer are implicated and coded. ‘Coded into what?’ you ask. The show’s meditation refuses answers and offers on instead Kouagou’s embodied self as possessive of intricacy and infinitude, giving-with (donner-avec), as Glissant would have told us, affording visual vocabularies, a vernacular of realizing; of the starting point from which to begin, construct and imagine again. As Césaire noted in his Notebook:

Commencer quoi

La seule chose au monde quil valle la peine de commencer:

1a Fin du monde parbieu.

(Césaire 1983: 32)

[Start what?

The only thing in the world worth starting:

The End of the world, for Heaven’s sake]

(Césaire, trans, Roselio and Pritchard 1995: 99)

The power comes from its ability to use negativity, its depths, while also engaging opposing ideas in a productive way.

Looking up at the work disrupts some of the usual ways we view and ;control; what we see as spectators. Challenging these typical ways of looking and understanding becomes especially meaningful, and important to feel free to make it your own.

Kouagou invites us to understand what we can and may become comfortable with, the discomfort of not knowing. The possible opacity and the power in challenging the dynamics of spectatorship and visual mastery as an extremely important intervention.