The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou, a large-scale immersive environment that combines his sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks and recorded sound.

Assembled from a stunning diversity of materials and found objects, Tayou’s art is characterized by an aesthetic of accumulation. He pierces Styrofoam with thousands of pins and razorblades, stacks hundreds of birdhouses against a wall, and adorns crystal glass figures with beads, plastic flowers, and feathers. This approach derives in part from the ways African sculpture is empowered with accumulations of materials to assert various kinds of religious, social, and political authority. Tayou uses this aesthetic to raise searching questions about inequalities of wealth and power in today’s postcolonial, global context at the same time he explores the hidden, spiritual forces that infuse ordinary, everyday life in African cities.

The exhibition opens with a preview on Saturday 1st November 2014 featuring a conversation with the artist and exhibition curator Gemma Rodrigues, curator of African arts at the Fowler Museum, and will be on display from Nov. 2, 2014–Mar. 1, 2015.

Pascale Marthine Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon and lives and works in Ghent, Belgium. World Share is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S.

www.fowler.ucla.edu