2022 Keynotes
Image by Samuel Fosso
Conversations with Samuel Fosso.
Click! is pleased to partner with the North Carolina Museum of Art, the 21c Museum Hotel and the University of North Carolina Department of Art and Art History to present Samuel Fosso.
Sunday, October 2nd, 4P.m. 21c Museum hotel Durham
monday, October 3rd, 6P.m. UNC Hanes art center
Samuel Fosso
Lives and works in Bangui, Central African Republic and Paris, France.
When I work, it’s always a performance that I choose to undertake. It’s not a subject or an object; it’s one more human being. I link my body to this figure, because I want to translate its history.
Image by Samuel Fosso
Working between photography, self-portraiture and performance, Samuel Fosso’s work occupies a central position in the international contemporary art world.
Born in 1962 in Kumba, Cameroon, Samuel Fosso had to flee the persecutions caused by the Biafra war. He sought refuge in Bangui, Central African Republic, where he opened his own photo studio at thirteen. Alongside his portrait work, he immediately began a series of self-portraits – a mode of representation he would never abandon. His expressive black-and-white self-portraits from the 1970s, making reference to popular West African culture, constitute a sustained and unprecedented photographic project that explores sexuality, gender, and African self-representation.
Although the genre of autofiction, and more specifically self-portraiture, has been widely used by artists since the 1970s, Samuel Fosso gives this practice a new dimension, one that is at once political and historical, fictional and intimate. Embodying key historical figures and social archetypes in front of the camera has become for him not only a way of existing in the world, but also a clear demonstration of the power of photography to construct myths.
In 1997, he produced his iconic series "Tati" - playing the role of various archetypes, from the Liberated American Woman of the 70s to the Golf Player and the Rocker. Humorous and biting, these images profoundly call into question the concepts of personal and social identity. The ability to enter into other lives, other journeys, is a common thread running through all of Samuel Fosso’s work, in which he explores the freedom to reinvent himself and create his own narrative.
He achieved in 2008 a series entitled "African Spirits" in which he embodied iconic identities fundamental to characters of African independence, the civil rights movement in the United States, or prominent cultural figures from Africa and the United States, such as Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Muhammad Ali, Seydou Keïta, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela.
With his series "Black Pope," revealed at the Bamako and Lagos festivals in 2017, the relentless Catholic veneration of whiteness in contemporary visual culture is resurrected in a restive, darker protest, which visualizes Samuel Fosso as the Pope. It is a series that directly challenges normative regimes of truth, power, officialdom, and the accoutrements that are used to reinforce belief.
A Conversation with Samuel Fosso
21c Museum Hotel Durham
Sunday October 2nd
4:00 pm
111 Corcoran Street
Durham, North Carolina
Admission is free.
Seating is limited.
Please register for this event here.
A Dialogue with Samuel Fosso: Photography, Histories, Identities
UNC Hanes Art Center
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Monday October 3rd
6:00 pm
121 E Cameron Ave
Chapel Hill, NC
