Ndayé Kouagou’s (b. 1992, Montreuil) various practices invariably start from language. This is his primary source material, for which he then finds a wide variety of forms that are always addressed to a counterpart. In the exhibition at Westfälischer Kunstverein, he brings together four video works, three large aluminium sheets with writing on them and a whole series of other objects made of fabric, acrylic glass and aluminium, which are also supplemented with fragments of text.
Kouagou's artistic practice stems from the process of writing; he explains how he had been writing about love for a long time and at some point wanted to know whether others felt the same way. How does a text reach its audience? Out of this question, Kouagou developed a lively performance practice that allowed him to address and confront the audience directly and, above all, to interpret his texts orally. This is how Kouagou – who is self-taught – entered the art world, which he feels can be an exclusive environment on occasion, which is why one of his working principles is that of generosity. He uses this term to summarise his desire for dialogue, openness and entertainment, or better still: amusement.
The performances developed over time into videos. This provenance is immediately apparent in them, as they show the artist, or the character he is portraying, in life-size and with a direct view of his audience. We have long been accustomed to this type of approach (at least subconsciously) through our consumption of social media and its influence on the visual aesthetics of our everyday lives: the figure of the influencer, the guru, the coach springs to mind – in short: a figure who knows everything and whom we should therefore copy in order to ameliorate our own lives.
This is also where the exhibition title comes into play: Sorry, your beloved mum is not always right! – the mother as the first authority in a person's life, whom one trusts and in whom one has unconditional faith. Once this assumption is challenged, suddenly everything can be questioned. Is everything my neighbour says, or my work colleague, or the guy on TV always true? What do you accept without reflection from external sources and where do you actually stand yourself on matters?
Ndayé Kouagou's special and rare talent is already evident here: the desire to entertain his audience, to be generous and inviting, is in no way accompanied by a loss of depth or sensitivity. This is also one of the artist's wishes: that the conversations he has with visi-tors through the videos continue to resonate after they have left the exhibition and, indeed, perhaps only then do they really begin.
But how does he achieve this? For Kouagou, generosity also includes accessibility from more than one angle: for some, this may be the visual language of social media, for others, the set-up is reminiscent of gaming, while for others again, the texts are appealing in a classical way. Another important factor in this context is the character that Kouagou embodies in his videos: he deliberately creates an ambiguous persona here that plays with the many markers that constitute identity. Kouagou tries to disappear behind this persona precisely in order not to speak from his perspective, but from that of an everyman (meaning "every human being", of course) or nobody. He has himself dressed by costume designers, sometimes appears more masculine, sometimes more feminine and has his voice dubbed. The voice we hear belongs to Salber Lee Williams, a woman from Zimbabwe whose English accent is – to our ears – difficult to place and who also speaks so professionally that she inspires confidence due to the impression her voice conveys of someone we know from the radio.
In terms of content, Ndayé Kouagou often plays with the temptations of a binary world view, with the lure of simple solutions and truths, only to slowly dismantle them once more. He is by no means interested in imparting wisdom himself, but rather in catalysing reflection. Reflection, above all, on the self and its construction.
Concealed in this is the question of one's own position, one's position in society, which can be found in various formulations in Kouagou's works. For example, when he asks: "Will you feel comfortable in my corner?" The corner, not the centre, is claimed here as his own and is perceived as comforting and safe. Then again, he concentrates on "the middle", where it is perhaps better, for the overview it affords alone.
The three videos, which are distributed throughout the large and small exhibition spaces, do not run in parallel, but sequentially. Pauses in the screenings show the audience where to go next. Here, too, Kouagou was concerned with generosity: the exhibition should feel as if it was tailor-made just for you. And so you not only mentally follow the thoughts, suggestions and doubts, but also actually follow the figure spatially as it moves from one video screen to the next. Every word the figure speaks is imbued with a personal or collective memory of a young generation that has grown up with the all-encompassing network of digital cultures, with its influential protagonists, the seductive language, the hair-trigger emotions and the overwhelming simultaneity of simply everything.
Ndayé Kouagou has internalised this zeitgeist and draws on its mechanisms, but with the notable difference that he invites us as an audience to contribute our thoughts by addressing us directly, allowing us to doubt and encouraging us to take our place in the complexity of the world.
This is the artist's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany.
