In company of Humans
presented by Kpingni Maureen Douabou
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In her novel En compagnie des hommes, Ivorian writer Véronique Tadjo gives voice to the Baoba tree. The tree, symbol of great wisdom, speaks and awakens the memory of humanity, as a deadly and incurable virus looms and threatens the human race with extinction. In this way, Véronique Tadjo revives the African narrative tradition of giving voice to plants, animals, and other inanimate natural elements, which thus become privileged observers of the humans with whom they coexist.
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Banner Artwork Details:
Nuits Balneaires, Adaholin1, 2021, R54,601.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY.
Nerissa Brobbey, A Nubian Harvest, 2024, R52,092.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY.
EXHIBITION CURATOR, KPINGNI MAUREEN DOUABOU
Kpingni Maureen (1990, Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire) is a visual artist, writer and curator found between the city center of Abidjan, the outskirts of Paris and other territories that fuel her practice. She draws on her Ivorian heritage and the legacy of black feminist thinkers and artists from Africa and its diaspora to shed light on the past, give birth to alternative narratives, question culture and weave new dialogues. She understands eroticism and sensuality as spiritual power and a tool for healing, and she explores depiction of the body as a powerful site of resistance, remembrance, pleasure, and transformation. Kpingni-Maureen is a multi-faceted, self-taught cultural practitioner. She expands her visual narratives into interdisciplinary realms, weaving together stories of collective memory, recovery, and the importance of community. She has exhibited her work and participated in culural mediation programmes in the United States, France, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. She is a recipient of the 2025 Prince Claus Seed award.
Kpingni Maureen Douabou, Cacao Boh, 2023, R13,767.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY.
The exhibition In the Company of humans follows this tradition by exploring how natural resources shape realities and influence relations of exchange, domination, but also resistance. Fauna, flora, land and bodies of water become guardians of history as well as messengers of stories.
In Fields of memory, the first chapter of the exhibition, Nerissa Brobbey and Rosalie Boka use painting to immortalize the natural environment maintained by those who came before us. With their photographic compositions, Adama Delphine Fawundu and Nuits Balnéaires offer another perspective on these landscapes. A perspective that merges environments with their inhabitants; environments marked by history as spaces for the exploitation of bodiesand materials. Like a fish chasing its own tail, these landscapes find themselves threatened today by climate change; a peril itself born a result of capitalist overexploitation. The idea of bodies and ecosystems merging appear with hedonistic sensuality in the digital collages of Kpingni Maureen Douabou, while Valerie Asiimwe Amani’s abstract textile artworks unfold like sensitive maps, woven from reminiscence.
Nuits Balneaires, Adalahin 4, 2021, R54,601.00 ex. VAT, CONTACT TO BUY.
Through the eyes of these artists, natural elements become central to the transmission of memory: collective, familial, and personal. They are not just silent witnesses, they also become active participants in human history. This first chapter of the exhibition invites contemplation and admiration. A certain sense of romanticisation runs through the works, firther softened by a nostalgic veil. A feeling of loss also lingers; loss for something gone, yet somehow still present.
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05 Nov 2025
