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 in society, and we'll get obliterated to
respect this.

[LESS]
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 in society, and we'll get obliterated to
respect this.