Biography: Born in Yaounde, Cameroon.
Lives and works in Paris and Yaounde


SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
1999-2000 Museum of Contemporary
Art, Helsinki
Trafique, Stedelijk Museum voor actucle
Kunst, Gant
Passage, Setagaya Museum, Tokyo
Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art,
Hokkaido
Hiroshima City of Contemporary Art,
Hiroshima
Nagoya City of Art, Nagoya
Kunsthalle Bern, Bern
1998 Everyday: 11th Biennale of
Sydney, Sydney
1997 De Rode Poort, Museum Van
Hedendaagse Kunst, Gent
Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht
Volkende Museum, Zurich
El Individuo y su Memoria: Sexta Bienal
de La Habana, Havana
SITE, Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe, New
Mexico
2nd Kwangju Biennale, South Korea
Trade Routes: History & Geography, 2nd
Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg


FURTHER READING
An Inside Story, Tokyo 1995
LOOOBHY: La Sculpture Mentale, 1st
Kwanju
Biennale, Kwangju, South Korea 1995
Neue Kunst aus Africa, Berlin 1995
Source:"Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue
Date of source:1999

Description: Pascale Marthine Tayou is an artist from
Cameroon who works in a variety of
media, often deliberately confounding the
expectations of the institutions that seek
to represent him. His mixed media
installations - made from objects and
materials found on-site - defy stylistic or
historical classification and
intentionally subvert formal resolution.


They are often politically contentious,
though not without humour. Using
images and texts to trace his own
history and identity Tayou offers a
personal view of the post-colonial
situation. He has also commented on
the prevalence of the AIDS virus in
Africa, and on the politics of the art
market.


Tayou has used objects found during his
stay in Liverpool for his installation in the
Exchange Flags building. The piece,
called Le Chantier, also includes a video
he shot in Sete in the south of France. It
documents a particularly dangerous
local event: Le Joute. Tayou's poetic
description of this ancient spectacle can
also be read as an attack on social and
political complacency, a theme he has
returned to repeatedly in his writing as
well as his art:



Movement / Energy
there is the public . . .
contradiction,
people find pleasure in the tension, like a
new fashion of life,
like a new way of social truth
maybe we live with some kind of tension
inside us?
And then this can explode,
like some kind of crash,
like volcanoes,
the burning flood
takes everything that crosses its path,
it gets settled into our deepest society.
This will transform society, and we'll get
obliterated to
respect this.
Description Source: "Trace, 1st Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art", Festival catalogue
Description Source Date: 1999
Gender: male
Type: person