Monika Emmanuelle Kazi at Kunsthalle Friart

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi constructs her work by drawing on an incarnated body memory in relation to her diasporic background. The artist transposes memories interlacing the personal with the global through the mediums of writing, installation, and performance. She explores the emotional charge of objects of a no-longer-existent everyday, of movements, matter, architecture, as porous zones of contact, traces of changing histories. La cour des grands is her first institutional exhibition.

The work The rules of the game (2021) opens the exhibition. It is presented in a separate architectural space evocative of the distance of a reminiscence. On a table with bent iron legs, the sound of water coming from a jerrican beside outsize children’s origami shapes. The table is mounted with a Ludo board. Known in Switzerland as L’Auberge, this African version of the game includes images in marquetry cut into the starting point, known as the “home”. Beside crystal glasses used as pawns in a half-finished game, you can make out a family on old photographs. On the other side of this generative space, a story takes shape around sparse objects, piled up in distinct areas. There is a relationship to the hand, to gestures charged with the symbolism of construction and games, extending the metaphor of a life conceived as destiny. The interplay of opposition structures the different arrangements of elements in the installation. Colours, objects, materials, and shapes articulate contrasted dualities. The blackness of the entrance wall comes in opposition to the white walls of the exhibition space. The very direct use of the floor resonates with the title (La cour des grands) and its evocation of the playground, creating a hierarchy of spatial values, between high and low. The values that emanate from the objects are constituted in relationship just as happens in the positions we take up in a game.

Terre-plein, terres mères (2022), reinterprets the intention to construct a house as an act that transforms land into building lots. Bricks in cement and ceramic, the raw and the cooked, make up a half-finished work site, left abandoned in the art space. The work recalls the way Western construction techniques are imitated, in spite of local resources and knowhow. The artist lodges variations on the symbol of the cross inside the bricks. Eschewing the discourse of Christianity, these motifs evoke the multiple and simultaneous uses of a primary form at the intersection of various cults.

In the receptacles of a museum-like showcase, ceramics surround coconuts. These evocations of hanaps, noble, decorated medieval goblets, are freely inspired from versions to be found in the collections of the Fribourg Museum of Art and History. The presence of the exotic fruit, an object of curiosity or trophy, draws our attention to the premises of a colonial history of possession. This group of rough-hewn sculptures, with the evocative title La Boisson (2022), is suggestive of the opulence and power of drinking as a model of incorporation. As if after feast, the museum itself, a place that conserves value, maintains canonical standards and establishes discourse by means of harnessing the innocent and fundamental quality of curiosity, here conflates this opulence and power with the pristine habit of conservation in an almighty incorporative gesture.

Instead of having six different faces, the faces of the ceramic dice all bear the same number, underlining a foreseen and corrupted distribution of chances. At the end of the exhibition, the video Do you know how to play? (2022), shows two protagonists in the middle of a game. From a distance, they are playing on the Ludo board that the artist uses at the beginning of the exhibition. The film offers no real narrative progression, apart from sinking us deeper and deeper into an ever-more abstract game of Ludo played by characters supposedly without a past. Beside a calm, relaxing lake, not far from the head office of a corporate monster, the movements of the performers recall the mythical dimension of an endless, senseless confrontation.

The publication of the exhibition will be launched on Saturday, November 5.

Monika Emmanuelle Kazi (*1991) lives and works between Geneva and Paris. Among her recent exhibitions Room with a View, Galerie Philipp Zollinger, Zürich (2022); Blink, Wallstreet, Fribourg (2021); Governmental Fires, Futura, Prague (2021); Handshake, sic! Elephanthouse, Lucerne (2021); Sandbox by Monika E. Kazi, HIT, Geneva (2019). Monika Emmanuelle Kazi is represented by Galerie Philipp Zollinger (Zürich).