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Exhibition Details

PRESS KIT
 

Solo exhibition: Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self'
Galerie Revel is very proud to present the first solo exhibition in France - and with the gallery - of the ceramic artist Bisila Noha. Entitled 'Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and Construction of the self' the exhibition will be on view from 20 October 2022 to 8 January 2023 in the gallery's Bordeaux space. 'Uprooting, re-rooting: Matter and The Construction of the self' bring together the largest body of work by Bisila Noha to date, produced and presented as a whole. The collection includes pieces from the past, present and future.
Bisila Noha's work in its substance is conceptual. Invoking complex notions of time, artistic legacy, transmission, identity and growth. The artist challenges ideas of separation by time and proposes a sense of belonging to a community of artists who came before her. Bisila Noha challenges the notions of value and recognition of a work of art, especially from the South or made by women artists from the South: what constitutes a work of art? Who has the right to call it so? Many artists have been qualified as such by Europeans, judging the work and the artist through the Eurocentric prism. From her early body of work, Brumas, to current projects that blur the boundaries between pottery and sculpture, to brand new pieces using other materials such as plaster and bronze. Among the works, the sculptures in the 'Reunion' series - a continuation of the ‘Two-legged' series - become larger and display an experimental approach between clay and plaster. 'Reunion' is the culmination of several years of research by Bisila Noha; a meeting point.
Words of the artist herself: "Since 2017, I have been looking at different pottery traditions, led by women in the Global South. Their energy, wisdom and experience - which I represent with two robust legs - are met with my energy and approach to making. It is a way for me to pay homage to all those - more often than not - forgotten women who have shaped the history of pottery. Whose stories and labour, because of the dominant patriarchal, Western, colonialist views on history, have sadly been ignored or belittled. At the same time, they represent that search for my own identity and voice as a woman maker in this matriarchal lineage of artists."
For the first time, plaster appears in the artist's work as a material translated into work and not only through a process of production. Working with clay and plaster tension and balance emerge from several works in three dimensions. In the world of ceramics, working with plaster in conjunction with ceramics causes cold sweat, as it often results in breakage. "Driven by a desire to bring my pieces a bit more alive, to make them more three-dimensional, along with that idea of making clay and plaster equals in a ceramics environment, those hybrid pieces were born." The volatility of plaster and the patience demanded by clay are respectively a metaphor for the child and the adult trying to find common ground. "They are about that fire we all carry inside. About the different sides of ourselves we embody, which often are in conflict”, illustrates Bisila Noha.
In her search for movement and dynamism, the artist has turned to cubist and futurist sculpture. The series of white stoneware ‘plates’ with black marbled effects is a continuation of what the artist was creating at the beginning of her practice. They are the evocation of a search for a union on a societal scale of certain dualities that are omnipresent in Noha's work: clay and plaster, the throwing technique and hand-building, the South and the North, black and white, the feminine and the masculine, the utilitarian and the artistic… A series of three vases - which are not vases - are reminiscent of relics that might belong to an ethnographic museum or painted abstractions reminiscent of the work of Toshiko Takaezu (1922-2011). The series of plates and vases are actually canvases for free compositions. Revealing beautiful mysterious visual textures as if they were reliques coming from another time as if it were fragments from the past.
The Brumas series, on the other hand, was created with a tactile approach to the production through which the sculpture is apprehended. Noha's work is increasingly sculptural, reminiscent of the counter-current impulse of Rebecca Warren's image sculptures, which work in such a way that the surface is never completely seductive. The exhibition also presents for the first time sculptures made in bronze. Theatrical, these pieces are revealed in movements reminiscent of the work of Kara Walker.
Bisila Noha’s oeuvre is in perpetual flow. Yet infused with complex and resolutely contemporary issues, her work appears simple, honest and even naive at times. Sometimes contemplative, sometimes dynamic but definitely political, her work teaches us about the importance of understanding that we are all connected despite our differences. Her work in this sense echoes the concept of Tout-Monde - an all-encompassing world - and creolisation thought by Edouard Glissant (1928-2011), poet, novelist, and essayist from Martinique. Posing the observation of a world given as evolutionary and as project. As an artist, a ceramist, and a woman of African and European origin, the affirmation of her multiple identities is felt in the essence of her work as well as in the aesthetics and constant quest.
Text by Prince Malik Jewiti

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