ImagoInsecta
Zest Artist Collective_ZAC
Dak’art OFF
19 May - 22 June 2022
SOKHAMON HOTEL DAKAR SÉNÉGAL
ZAC artists have immersed themselves into the parallel reality of the insect world through engaging in empathic and ecocentric dialogues with particular insect species indigenous to their country. By using various mind-mapping techniques as a framework for their research ZAC artists have generated speculative narratives and hypothetical imagery using different medium. These include photographic montage, conceptual installations, textiles, drawing, sculpture and embroidery. Through their art practice ZAC artists endeavour to explore and highlight insects’ inseparable symbiotic relationships with the ecological balance of our planet.
Zest Artist Collective_ZAC
Dak’art OFF
19 May - 22 June 2022
SOKHAMON HOTEL DAKAR SÉNÉGAL
ZAC artists have immersed themselves into the parallel reality of the insect world through engaging in empathic and ecocentric dialogues with particular insect species indigenous to their country. By using various mind-mapping techniques as a framework for their research ZAC artists have generated speculative narratives and hypothetical imagery using different medium. These include photographic montage, conceptual installations, textiles, drawing, sculpture and embroidery. Through their art practice ZAC artists endeavour to explore and highlight insects’ inseparable symbiotic relationships with the ecological balance of our planet.
COHESION
Text by Ousseynou Wade
The image of an insect, more than a simple visual perception, can be extended to everything that ensures harmony and
balance to life on earth. This brings us back to a more demanding respect for an environment whose complexity is to be
considered as an essential natural reality. The confinement to which the world has been forced recently has exposed the
fragility of man and his environment. This period has been and still is one of unprecedented creativity, particularly for artists
who have made ecology a source of inspiration and a medium for study, experimentation and production. Among these
actors, six have chosen to share their practice and experience during the fourteenth edition of the Biennale of
Contemporary African Art. These artists come from the four corners of the world and have such rich backgrounds that their
paths have crossed, sometimes often, in other countries. These encounters have strongly nourished the flame of a will to
surpass oneself in order to make an ever more significant contribution to the fight to safeguard an environment that is the
victim of various aggressions, the most violent of which are those of man.
Science and nature, man and his environment, myths and realities are some of the aspects of a narrative about our
existence. The rigorous observation of the species that populate our existence reveals the reality of the complexity of
nature and the interdependence of these same species. The narrative, in the form of an installation, a performance, a video
or a sculpture, is to be appreciated as a hymn to the diversity, interdependence and adaptability that we share. It is also to
be considered as an awareness of the reality of our existence, made of growth, transformation, sometimes mutation,
maturation.
Their names are Sally Kidall, Lucia Loren, Karin Van der Molen, Karen Macher, Elena Redaelli and Imke Rust. They belong
to the ZEST Art Collective. They have chosen to share their perception of the realities that surround us. From these realities
they question the life of insects, these beings whose existence reflects our capacity of adaptation, renewal, transformation
and reproduction. The works that are proposed have the particularity of being constructed from the environment of their
production with elements that nature offers. They are created with respect for this same nature with which they maintain a
constructive dialogue in a profound respect. I had a fabulous experience with Karin Van der Molen, Elena Redaelli and
Imke Rust in the Banco National Park in the Ivory Coast. Each of them communicated with the forest before defining the
place and form of intervention that this immense density of giant species seemed to grant them.
The proposal conceived for Dakar three years later, far from being a logical continuation of Abidjan Green Art initiated by
the talented sculptor Jems Koko Bi, is from my point of view a commitment, as there have been others since, to pursue their
quest for meaning in a passage made of deconstruction, decomposition and renewal. The ephemeral nature of the works
of the Zest Art Collective will be supported by a mental map representing the intimacy of the relationship between species
in a relationship that ensures the balance of our natural environment. Here we are at the heart of an environmental issue,
the very one that requires each and everyone to take responsibility for future generations. Here we are also at the heart of
the essential question of a humanity to be built and consolidated together.
Ousseynou WADE
Text by Ousseynou Wade
The image of an insect, more than a simple visual perception, can be extended to everything that ensures harmony and
balance to life on earth. This brings us back to a more demanding respect for an environment whose complexity is to be
considered as an essential natural reality. The confinement to which the world has been forced recently has exposed the
fragility of man and his environment. This period has been and still is one of unprecedented creativity, particularly for artists
who have made ecology a source of inspiration and a medium for study, experimentation and production. Among these
actors, six have chosen to share their practice and experience during the fourteenth edition of the Biennale of
Contemporary African Art. These artists come from the four corners of the world and have such rich backgrounds that their
paths have crossed, sometimes often, in other countries. These encounters have strongly nourished the flame of a will to
surpass oneself in order to make an ever more significant contribution to the fight to safeguard an environment that is the
victim of various aggressions, the most violent of which are those of man.
Science and nature, man and his environment, myths and realities are some of the aspects of a narrative about our
existence. The rigorous observation of the species that populate our existence reveals the reality of the complexity of
nature and the interdependence of these same species. The narrative, in the form of an installation, a performance, a video
or a sculpture, is to be appreciated as a hymn to the diversity, interdependence and adaptability that we share. It is also to
be considered as an awareness of the reality of our existence, made of growth, transformation, sometimes mutation,
maturation.
Their names are Sally Kidall, Lucia Loren, Karin Van der Molen, Karen Macher, Elena Redaelli and Imke Rust. They belong
to the ZEST Art Collective. They have chosen to share their perception of the realities that surround us. From these realities
they question the life of insects, these beings whose existence reflects our capacity of adaptation, renewal, transformation
and reproduction. The works that are proposed have the particularity of being constructed from the environment of their
production with elements that nature offers. They are created with respect for this same nature with which they maintain a
constructive dialogue in a profound respect. I had a fabulous experience with Karin Van der Molen, Elena Redaelli and
Imke Rust in the Banco National Park in the Ivory Coast. Each of them communicated with the forest before defining the
place and form of intervention that this immense density of giant species seemed to grant them.
The proposal conceived for Dakar three years later, far from being a logical continuation of Abidjan Green Art initiated by
the talented sculptor Jems Koko Bi, is from my point of view a commitment, as there have been others since, to pursue their
quest for meaning in a passage made of deconstruction, decomposition and renewal. The ephemeral nature of the works
of the Zest Art Collective will be supported by a mental map representing the intimacy of the relationship between species
in a relationship that ensures the balance of our natural environment. Here we are at the heart of an environmental issue,
the very one that requires each and everyone to take responsibility for future generations. Here we are also at the heart of
the essential question of a humanity to be built and consolidated together.
Ousseynou WADE
Ousseynou Wade is a theorist and curator based in Dakar, Sénégal. From 2000 to 2013, he directed the Dakar Biennale. He
has participated in numerous international conferences on cultural policy, cultural industries, and the financing of cultural
activities, and organised professional meetings on art criticism, cultural journalism and design. In 2013 he was appointed
Director of Visual Arts for the Minister of Culture of Senegal. Ousseynou Wade is currently an independent consultant with
a focus on innovative contemporary African Art.
Click on the above image to open our exhibition catalogue as a PDF file.
Exhibition views:
@zestartistcollective2021