Following the life and career of Younousse Seye, one of Senegal’s first female contemporary artist, this forthcoming multimedia project examines the contingencies that govern the remembrance of Black women artists.
WACTH AN EXCERPT FROM THE FILM
This forthcoming project highlights how fragile the intergenerational transmission of knowledge can be and how fickle institutional circuits of remembrance are. It unpacks these themes by uniting a cinema, installation, digital catalogue, and print zine in a forthcoming multimedia project honoring the life and career of Younousse Seye (born 1940), Senegal’s first contemporary female artist.
A self-taught, mixed media artist whose work was exhibited and collected in the United States and across the world, who has advocated for women, and whose acting credits include films with one of the pioneers of African cinema, Ousmane Sembene – Seye has had a remarkable career in both the visual arts and film.
She enjoyed many group (e.g. Paris, 1974; Washington D.C., 1980; Tokyo, 1981) and solo exhibitions (e.g. Abidjan, 1972; Addis Ababa, 1975; Dakar, 1996). She counted international state leaders as collectors and regularly rubbed shoulders with the Black avant-garde. At age 84, Seye’s fame and influential body of work should position her at the summit of her career. Instead, you can scarcely find her name in Senegalese, African, or Black art histories or exhibitions.
This project does more than reclaim Seye’s legacy; it endeavors to hold art audiences to account in mechanisms of structural neglect. Bringing together a group of collaborators that includes the historian and curator Merve Fejzula and filmmaker Lendl Tellington, this project employs cinema, immersive installation, and textual production to imagine new methods of memory-making. Drawing aesthetic cues from Seye’s oeuvre, the project centers matrilineal Black artistry, or in Seye’s words, an age of all women.