THE ROSE SALON

Pélagie Gbaguidi (1965, Senegal) calls herself a contemporary ‘griot’, which she defines as someone who functions as an intermediary between individual memory and ancestral past. Her work is an anthology of the signs and traces of trauma and is centred on colonial and postcolonial history. She draws attention to the ways in which legacies of oppression are circumvented – and thus preserved – in official histories. 

Pélagie Gbaguidi aims to reveal the process of forgetting by recontextualizing archives and histories. Her works are not direct representations but rather transmit embodied knowledge. The images created by Gbaguidi through painting, drawing, performance and installation seek to break out of binary thinking, archetypes and simplifications. For her important series ‘Naked Writings’ she investigated the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. The title ‘Naked Writings’ refers to the importance of un-learning, of shedding prior beliefs and consequently decolonizing the mind