Pélagie Gbaguidi’s Fragmentation (2024) was developed in Angers in collaboration with students and researchers in order to rethink an existing historical work: The Apocalypse, a 14th-century sequence of six large-scale tapestries depicting the story of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, now held in the French province of Anjou. Gbaguidi’s reinterpretation displaces the depicted story’s Biblical origins and instead reads it through a dystopic lens, divided into different themes such as ‘earth’, ‘gender’, ‘human sacrifices’ and ‘human shields’.
The paintings in Fragmentation are spread across sixteen flour bags. Collected by the artist from her local bakery in Brussels, these bags are loaded with meaning, referring to societal ills such as problems of basic sustenance and hunger. In this constellation of images, a ball of thread emerges from one figure’s belly, symbolising the world as a knot in dire need of intervention, unravelling and untangling.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965, Dakar) is an artist from Benin who lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi considers herself to be a contemporary griot, a story-teller who functions as an intermediary between the ancestral past and contemporary individual and collective memory in West African cosmology. She articulates the social and symbolic undercurrents of colonial and post-colonial legacies, processing the signifiers of trauma through materially embodied images. Among Gbaguidi’s solo exhibitions are Antre, La Verrière – Fondation Hermès, Brussels (2025); Murmurations, Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – Château de Rochechouart (2024); De-Fossilization of the Look, Mimosa House, London (2023). Group exhibitions include documenta 14, Kassel and Athens (2017); 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2020); Écrire, c’est dessiner (To Write is to Draw), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021).
EXHIBITED WORKS
Pélagie Gbaguidi (b. 1965)
Fragmentation (from the series Quel est le sens de la vie sur terre et la fabrique de la conscience), 2024
Pigment on flour bags
Variable dimensions
Courtesy of the artist, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Goodman Gallery
