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Georges Adéagbo

Born, 1942 in Cotonou,Benin

From the archived Documenta 11 website: www.documenta12.de//archiv/d11/data/english/index.html

“In 1971, Georges Adéagbo began making his first installations in the courtyard of his house in Cotonou. Over the next two decades he continued to work in isolation until a chance meeting with a French curator and collector catapulted him into the art world. Adéagbo insists that it is difficult to consider his work “art” and his resistance to being labeled an “artist” can be interpreted as a profound questioning of both categories.

Being outside of the canonical notion of “contemporary art” lends Adéagbo’s work its character of radically challenging the assumptions the label embodies. Nearly all of Adéagbo’s works derive from a central anecdote that the artist connects to the reason behind the execution of the work. His installations always contain a narrative element, but the narration serves more as a pretext for devising a research procedure which then draws from diverse references. Adéagbo contemplates cultural processes, the histories of Africa and Europe, the history of art and the events of his own life from a perspective of exteriority that allows him to assume an alert and critical position without succumbing to ideological conditioning or simplification.”