SOUS PILOTIS: CHADA GNANGORAN
On view exhibition
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Overview
Chada Gnangoran, Bourgeons, 2026
In architecture, stilts serve to support a building’s foundations. For the Ivorian artist Chada Gnangoran, however, they embody an in-between space. They connect the invisible to the visible. By subverting the expression "sur pilotis" (“raised on stilts”) for the title of his solo exhibition "Sous pilotis" (“Beneath the Stilts”), he shifts our perspective. He invites reflection on the origins of culture, its transmission and transformations over time.
Upon entering the exhibition space, the visitor encounters a precarious structure: a shack assembled from wooden planks and corrugated metal sheets. In this installation, Gnangoran condenses his experiences of Côte d’Ivoire. The exhibition as a whole is rooted in his journey through his native country. Returning to Abidjan after three years at the Beaux-Arts de Marseille, he set out once again – not to the other side of the world, but across the country in which he was born. Not to escape, but to seek. Through movement, he develops lines of inquiry in an attempt to address questions of identity. By stepping beyond the confines of the studio, movement itself becomes a working method.
Throughout his travels – from Yamoussoukro to Tiébissou, then from Katiola to Korhogo – he has sensed, encountered, and engaged with diverse cultures and traditions, while immersing himself in ancestral forms of craftsmanship.
Following in Gnangoran’s footsteps across Côte d’Ivoire, the visitor encounters works enriched by centuries-old artisanal knowledge. On the walls, the textile compositions are dyed with indigo using techniques learned in Ndébo, a village on the outskirts of Yamoussoukro. Silkscreened forms – composite assemblages bringing together photographic portraits captured during the artist’s journey and traditional statuary – are layered onto the fabric. The works are adorned with embroidery, beads, and shells. These embellishments draw inspiration from ceremonial garments observed by the artist in Dassoungboho, near Korhogo, during a Poro initiation procession. Both festive and sacred, the ceremony marks the culmination of a long-term process of education and transformation among the Senufo communities of northern Côte d’Ivoire.
Witnessing such a ritual profoundly transformed the way Gnangoran conceives transmission and interprets it in his work. In his textile compositions, transmission was, until then, expressed through gestures. It is now imbued with an additional ritual dimension. The works presented in Sous pilotis explore the porous boundary between the material world and the realm of spirits – a space where the dichotomy between corporeal presence and absence dissolves, and where traditions endure, binding individuals together.
Through works born from the interweaving of materials and iconographies, Gnangoran proposes an aesthetic of hybridity. They embody identities in flux and give visual form to a state in which different cultures coexist within a fertile tension. It is precisely this complexity that the artist explores through his layered canvases. Tradition and contemporary life converge, and transmission is simultaneously physical and ritual.
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