ANTANANARIVO
APRIL 2 TO JUNE 23, 2024
Fondation H has invited Charlotte Yonga for a three-month residency in Antananarivo from April 2 to June 23, 2024 as part of the exhibition Memoria: accounts of another History.
As part of Memoria: accounts of another History, Yonga presents a multimedia installation titled Le Grand écart [The Great Divide], created between 2010 and 2017. The installation, which features a portrait of Chief Innocent Nayang Toukam anda video, is a reconstruction of the traditional Cameroonian chief’s visit to France in 1991. At the same time unique and typical, this experience was deeply moving for a man who had never left his homeland. Through her artwork, the artist takes a close look at individuals and territories, and at the varying perspectives of the global North and South. She focuses the lens on “ordinary” people, who become central to the observer.
For her residency at Fondation H, Yonga is working on a third photographic series — following Naam Na La, a series produced in 2021 in Senegal, which explores through portraits still lifes and landscapes, the nuances and complexities of love in everyday life from embraces to torments, and questions love patterns that are influenced by social expectations and norms; and Salt Wind, a series developed in 2023 in Malta as an ode to organic, undefined relationships marked by native instability, thus inviting reflection on love and its multiple expressions, sometimes tangible, sometimes elusive, which reflects her desire to shift and decentralize the gaze. For her, it is a gesture of reparation aimed at broadening the scope of representations of the black, female African figure. According to Yonga, it is essential “as African women, to grant ourselves the right, the freedom and the pleasure to fantasize ourselves”. This third series, enriched with Malagasy voices, is fully in line with the aim of Memoria: accounts of another History: to see the world from a different perspective. A perspective this time anchored in the insular context of the Grande Île.
Yonga is investing more in her photographic research in Antananarivo, while reflecting her discovery of the Malagasy territory, her encounters, her textures and hues. Her artistic approach constantly seeks to value interpersonal relationships, whether familial, romantic or friendly, and feelings of maternal, fraternal and sororal affection, as well as an attachment to the material, natural and spiritual world. Finally, by associating abstract drawings with her photographs, she adds a psychic and introspective dimension to the whole and puts the observer in front of analog, free and random dialogues, which are sources of new visual and emotional intrigues.
Shunning the stereotyped views of the African continent and of people from the global South, Yonga seeks to explore missing representations, seeing these gaps as a denial of the plurality of identities. Through her work, she aims to contribute to bridging these gaps by creating magnetic portraits which capture the density, strength and fragility of (anonymous) street models. At the same time, she questions the experience of love as a social and cultural construct. With the objective of inventing new, enigmatic narratives, she likes to encrypt the obvious in order to transcend future memories and outdated projections, thereby inviting us to choose and create our own narratives and representations, assuming their fabrication beyond prejudgments.
CHARLOTTE YONGA'S BIOGRAPHY
Born in 1985 in Paris, Charlotte Yonga is a French-Cameroonian artist who lives and works between Barcelona (Spain) and Paris (France). Through her creative process, which integrates photography, video and drawing, Yonga invites the visitor to explore fragments inspired by reality, and scenes of intimate lives and alerity or ‘otherness’ through which she reveals complex truths. In a subtle back-and-forth between fantasy and reality, she encrypts the obvious and blurs boundaries, revealing at times ambivalent meanings that challenge the limits of our collective and individual projections.