Resonance of Form: A Tribute to Sarah Baartman: Solo Show by Ilídio Candja Candja
The show stems from the artist's increasing interest in the ways in which a new model of significance was generated and shaped by the historical and civilisational encounter between Africa and Europe. It includes around 12 new works divided into three distinct sections, including the body of work that gives the exhibition its name and pays homage to Sarah Baartman.
By evoking this iconic figure - also known as the "Hottentot Venus" - exulted during the colonial period as an object of curiosity and spectacle, whose history reflects the fetishisation of African women's bodies and the endemic racism rooted in science, Ilídio Candja Candja seeks to challenge and subvert the inveterate colonial narratives, promoting the resignification and recovery of control over the representation of the body, identity and historical and collective memory.
Through this exhibition, Candja's space of creative expression becomes a stage for asserting power and affirming humanity in the face of oppression. Equally, the formal and technical exploration via gestualism and abstract expressionism adds a layer of complexity to the engagement with Baartman's story.
In the lens of abstraction, the artist transcends the field of literal representation to evoke profound emotional and conceptual responses. The use of colour and textures, the babelic composition and the musical allusion present in the resonance and reverberation of the forms become language exercises of a metaphorical and metamorphic nature, through which the artist evokes, under the spectre of resilience, the idea of the persistence of notions of funestation and mourning in the dilation of the processes of historical reparation.
