Fanny Souade Sow
Forever Ever
Like a bad advertising slogan, an ironic promise aimed at the disenchanted consumer. Forever and ever, come and admire artworks of great price ! Forever and ever, become the foremost consumers of the remnants of pain ! Through this constellation of multimedia works, Fanny Souade Sow examines our dream of infinity and our relationship to the temporality of objects by raising a fundamental question: what happens when we grant the artwork the right to disappear ?
In museology, the artefact is conserved, preserved and restored. It is cast in eternity, becoming the guarantor of a heritage deemed worthy of safeguarding. Yet through this very process, the object is neutralised, emptied of its agency and original context, and reduced to its aesthetic value. In opposition to this process of “object emprisonment ¹”, the sculptor questions the tradition of conservation as well as our relationship to such items. On one hand, a cast of a Senoufo mask surmounts the model of a modern citrus press, on another, a chair originally made of wood is weighed down through the use of metal: so many reversals that unsettle and destabilise the value assigned to these objects.
Fanny Souade Sow works with a wide range of natural and synthetic materials, from wax and resin to wood and metal, all destined to evolve over time, to deteriorate under the effects of their
environment. They are bound to undergo decay: just as human flesh is subject to entropy ², so too is the flesh of the object.
These materials are charged with a powerful narrative rooted in a militant anti-imperialist critique. They sustain the memorialisation of fragments originally ephemeral in nature — tweets, expressions, poems — exhumed from the internet and now anchored to tangible objects. Upon a wax panel one can read: “Stay Black and die”, “We’ll burn everything”, a series of lapidary statements that the artist chooses to elevate to the status of essential archives.
Eva S. Augustine
¹ Clémentine Deliss, “Manifesto for the Right of Access to Colonial Collections Sequestered in Western Europe,” Multitudes, no. 73, 2018/4, Association Multitudes Editions, pp. 18–24.
² Entropy describes the inevitable dissipation and loss of energy leading to the thermal destruction of the universe.
