What kinds of buildings “belong” in Africa? How is a country’s national story told through its architecture? When should the structures of the past be dispensed for the future? The Past is a Foreign Country is the first solo exhibition in North America by the Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré, whose photographs from West Africa and France survey relics and narratives of the built environment.

Commissioned for the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, The Past is a Foreign Country features site-specific installations of immersive wallpaper prints and a highly detailed network of more than 50 studies of buildings and architectural fragments. Central to the exhibition is a selection of images from multiple series Gbré created throughout West Africa between 2009 and 2015, a chronicle of imposing governmental structures, shuttered factories, and incomplete homes.

The past in Gbré’s photographs is foreign and unfinished. Heroic military statues in Bamako, Mali, claim victories for a nation beleaguered by violence. Housing developments in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, seek to erase the memory of an urban slum. A new car becomes the futurist symbol of an emergent middle class. But Gbré doesn’t propose a comprehensive history of French colonialism in West Africa or of the turbulent growth of post-independence African cities. Instead, united by a methodical, often distanced perspective on architecture and landscape as a form of documentary evidence, his images summon the personal experience of public space and the social aspirations encoded in concrete, rebar, clay, and dust.

François-Xavier Gbré was born in 1978 in Lille, France. After studying at the École  Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques in Montpellier, he worked in fashion and design photography in Milan. This experience led him to explore African stories through landscape and architecture. Gbré’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Africa and Europa, including Abroad, Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria: Surfaces and Fragments, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; DAK’ART: The 11th Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; FLOW, Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery, Japan; We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K.; Synchronicity II, Tiwani Contemporary, London; and Rencontres de Bamako–The African Biennale of Photography. In September 2015, he will participate in The Lay of the Land, an exhibition on emerging African photographers, at The Walther Collection in New York. Gbré lives and works in Abidjan.

The Past is a Foreign Country is curated by Brendan Wattenberg, Director of Exhibitions at The Walther Collection in New York, and presented by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College and the Tuttle Creative Residencies Program. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph with contributions by Emmanuel Iduma, Brendan Wattenberg, and Susanna D. Wing.

Part of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, associate director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and campus exhibitions, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu.

Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Friday, September 4, from 4:30–7:30pm

Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
Haverford College
370 Lancaster Avenue,
Haverford, PA 19041

exhibits.haverford.edu/thepastisaforeigncountry