When The Sky Split Open: SOLO SHOW BY Ibrahim Bemba Kébé

17 May - 1 August 2025

Overview

“When The Sky Split Open” is the first solo exhibition — and simultaneously the international debut — of the young Malian artist Ibrahim Bemba Kébé.

In a time marked by crises of belonging, spiritual fracture, and a deep yearning for re-rooting, Ibrahim Bemba Kébé unveils a body of fourteen entirely new works, all created throughout 2025. Together, they construct a speculative cosmogony in which body, gesture, memory, and symbol are interwoven to form a visual grammar of rare intensity.

The title of the exhibition suggests an ontological rupture — the opening of a spatiotemporal field where the visible and the invisible, the sacred and the political, heritage and imagination confront one another not as opposites, but as complementary forces.

The poetic dimension of Ibrahim Bemba Kébé’s work arises from matter itself: burlap, lace, repurposed fabrics, cowrie shells, wood, and pigments constitute the tactile lexicon of a language that reveals itself as both intimate and ancestral.

From a technical standpoint, his practice is grounded in a hybrid approach that merges low-relief painting with textile installation. It draws upon the aesthetic traditions of West Africa — with particular emphasis on Soninke, Bambara, and Mandinka iconographies — while firmly rejecting all forms of folklorisation or exoticist aestheticisation. Instead, Kébé inscribes his gesture within a spiritual and critical lineage in which the artwork becomes a medium of listening, mediation, and transmission.

Kébé is a builder of bridges between times and worlds. His visual universe articulates a profound cultural and spiritual heritage with a radical contemporaneity, forming a synthesis wherein the ritual gesture projects itself into the future without forsaking the resonances of the past. He proposes a path toward rethinking the place of the sacred and the modes of transmitting knowledge within postcolonial societies. Between the weight of memory and the urgency of an inhabitable future, Kébé reaffirms the dignity of creation as a gesture of listening, resistance, and emancipation.

When The Sky Split Open unfolds as an epiphany — a space of suspension and rite, where the murmur of what insists on remaining may still be heard. A space where, perhaps, the sky continues to split — allowing us to listen for that which has not yet been named.

Works