Assoukrou

Born in 1995 in Bonoua in the Ivory Coast, I live and work between Abidjan, Paris and Tours; graduated in 2019 from a DNA with the congratulations of the jury of the TALM-Tours higher school of art and design; I am in the process of obtaining my DNSEP mention Art. I have always stretched my gaze and my curiosity towards the countries of the Persian shore and the valley of the Great African Rift (Including the Congo). It is natural that my artistic approach embraced the influences of these African and Eastern territories. So, my first questions concerned the ambivalence of the power of photo reports from war-torn areas in the Arab and Black worlds, the aesthetics of the current cliché as well as the banality of the expression of violence. From this cathartic period resulted a current work more anchored in universality and centered on the crossroads Geography - Politics - Tradition. Between visual arts and documentary research, one element unites the plurality of my work, it is the questioning of human relations in African societies and the metaphysical potential of the translation of historical narratives. Through forms as diverse as video, installation, painting and drawing, my productions bear witness to my interest in collecting, translating and transmitting African history and oral stories. They also reveal a deep interest in postcolonial history as a point of departure which serves to raise different sociological, historical and political questions posed by the molding of humanity, the materialist culture of the West on African territories before and after the independence and the emancipation of black after the sun of said independence. How has freedom of the free man evolved? Can emancipation be qualified today as freedom for the peoples of Africa?

Focusing on what is taboo, little shown or documented, "the historical backgrounds", my goal is to show how the History which is unknown or hidden to us evolves in a Transgenerational way, is transformed, adapts, is regenerated like the matrix of a molding. Thus, through these multiple questions, I undertake research work that is at once geographic, sociological, anthropological or dreamlike. By plunging into the roots of my origins to draw images, texts, symbols or striking speeches. We thus discover there "the historical backgrounds" and the diversity of a culture which wants to be free and eternal put forward by a work on the borders of two worlds, which the naturalness and the weight of the words serenely converse. Everything is linked, tables and volumes meet, succeed, overlap, add up or multiply. They thus become as many hyphens from my research as simple pictorial or visual translations of stories projecting towards a new imaginary.