Jess Atieno: Odyssey

Galerie Cécile Fakhoury presents Jess Atieno’s solo exhibition Odyssey from November 25, 2023 to April 27, 2024. For her first solo presentation in Senegal, Jess Atieno has conceived her exhibition as an odyssey, a visual account of her personal journey through photographic archives.

For several years, the artist’s work has explored notions of place belonging and home, those physical and psychic spaces that we conceive as part of our identity. The archival images at the time, postcards, documents and maps that sometimes appear as watermarks in the works highlight the complex processes of dispossession – of identities, land and images – that took place during the colonial era. Using fragmentation and collage techniques as narrative tools, Atieno makes effort to occupy the space beyond the visual field of the photograph. In this way, proposing new poetic readings: she opens up a haunting space with untold stories independent of the archive. The titles chosen by the artist evoke a language of the ghostly and poetic remembrance.

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