La Cour [The Courtyard] is an artwork born from the meeting between artists François-Xavier Gbré and Yo-Yo Gonthier. It is a visual and evolutive space wherein each artist’s aesthetic is freely moving and interacting. Since four years, François-Xavier Gbré and Yo-Yo Gonthier have been building a richer and deeper dialogue: La Cour captures this series of shared experiences.
The installation À Découvert was exhibited during the 10th Rencontres de la Photographie in Bamako, Mali. It is the starting point of this artistic dialogue. The African Photography Biennial, as is Blabla Hippodrome where the installation was set, are places connecting people and ideas. There, François-Xavier Gbré and Yo-Yo Gonthier conceive photography as an alter ego for reality: photography is an open door to digg into alternative realities the viewer is free to question. The common reflexion is taking shape again for the show Lueurs Noires at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury – Abidjan in 2016. In the dim light of the gallery, François-Xavier Gbré and Yo-Yo Gonthier are inviting us to forestep the glaring evidence and encourage us to explore side roads contained within their images as they have the power to open on new ways of seeing. In 2017, they are taking possession of Cinema El Hilal, in Bamako, Mali. It is the first episode of La Cour. There, the obscurity of the cinema becomes the place for all dreams to happen. Within the conflicted socio-political context in contemporary Mali, François-Xavier Gbré and Yo- Yo Gonthier are questioning the future of younger generations‘hope today. The cinema’s walls are turned into the conversation partners of an open discussion about freedom of speech and art, about politics, and about the need for dream, for inventing, for questioning and the possibilities to do so.
Today, in Paris Photo, the display is a synthesis of this all: a moment in the original mouvement of a collaboration which will soon reach out new territories, as for La Cour is existing in movements from a country to a continent, from a circumstance to a moment. It gets richer from the matter which surrounds it, from the in situ as from the circumstances.
For more information: https://www.parisphoto.com/fr/Exposants/5071816/CECILE-FAKHOURY
Information
PARIS PHOTO 2018 - Grand Palais, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury
3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 75008 Paris France
November 08, 2018 to November 11, 2018
