18th Istanbul Biennial: The Three-Legged Cat
September 20, 2025 - September 20, 2025
18th Istanbul Biennial
Pélagie Gbaguidi’s paintings, drawings, and writings revolve around the artist’s self-understanding as a griot, an oral storyteller and mediator in West Africa who conjoins the present, the ancestral past, and the realms of individual and collective memory. With their focus on unworking the legacies of trauma, Gbaguidi’s works often employ symbols and material embodiment to unspool, rework, and understand post-colonial legacies.
At the Istanbul Biennial, Gbaguidi’s Fragmentation (2024) presents 16 elements from a larger series entitled “Quel est le sens de la vie sur terre et la fabrique de la conscience” [What is the meaning of life on earth and the making of conscience]. Presented on the wall in an irregular tessellation, the Fragmentation series comprises paintings spread across sixteen flour bags collected by Gbaguidi from her local bakery in Brussels, Belgium; the flour bags are symbolically loaded items referring to basic sustenance and societal ills such as hunger. Gbaguidi’s project responds to an existing, historical work, the Apocalypse Tapestry, which is a 14th century French sequence of six large-scale tapestries, now held in Anjou, depicting the story of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation through a suite of 90 scenes. In Gbaguidi’s reinterpretation of this historical work, she displaces the depicted story’s Biblical origins and instead reads it through a dystopic lens. In one painting, for instance, a female figure beats a drum, calling forth a process of transformation. Bodies and legs spill out from across the picture plane, while abstract and figurative forms mingle in states of tension and overlay: a ball of threads notably emerges from one figure’s belly, for the artist, a depiction of the world in a state of unravelment that requires intervention and discussion.
