December 1st 2023 - March 9th, 2024
Vertigineuses
Shahrzad Changalvaee - Melinda Fourn - Naomi Lulendo - Attandi Trawalley - Nelly Zagury
Curated by Jennifer Houdrouge & Clara Darrason
Vertigineuses
As part of the 12th edition of Partcours, Selebe Yoon is pleased to present « Vertigineuses » a group exhibition co-curated by Jennifer Houdrouge and Clara Darrason, with artists Shahrzad Changalvaee, Melinda Fourn, Naomi Lulendo, Attandi Trawalley and Nelly Zagury.
Altitude and the temptation of the monumental arouses a vertigo that the possibility of falling cannot curb. « Vertigineuses » is impregnated with magic realism, each artist drawing as much on artisanal skills and popular imagery as on tales from collective narratives, or personal stories from intersecting geographies. Selebe Yoon morphs into a suspended garden into which the five artists trace, dig, let ripen and grow works that exist at the intersection of the intimate, the everyday, the domestic, but also the supernatural, the dreamlike and the erotic.
A synthetic hair creature erupts from Selebe Yoon’s ground floor staircase and rises several meters into the air. Attandi Trawalley crocheted artificial capillarity evokes intimate gestures, mourning and renewal at a monumental scale. Summoning childhood memories and coming of age, she weaves those life milestones with patience and imbues her creation with self-care.
As in the opera of her dreams, Nelly Zagury deploys paintings of reborn female bodies and anthropomorphic feline figures in flows of buoyant colors and a glittering palette. She also presents a large-scale functioning fountain made of painted metal, with oviform water jets - an ode to the matrix and the sovereignty of the creative act.
Shahrzad Changalvaee, artist and activist for equality and Iranian women’s liberation, unfurls a site-specific installation, “Everything Is Crystal Clear” a saline landscape from which emerge scattered found images interweaving histories, memories and traumas. Employing locally sourced salt and sand as her primary material, she constructs encompassing environments of abstract landscapes and dispersions. The acidic and corrosive crystals of salt, often traded by women in the region, animate wounded skins, raised fists, fingers with various injunctions, entwined hands—gestures that either make, control or liberate.
Melinda Fourn built a large-scale metal and ceramic sculpture in the shape of a satala - a teapot-shaped kettle often made of plastic, common in several West African countries. Magnifying the object’ size, the artist emancipates the satala from its functionalities and unleashes an unbridled domesticity through an unexpected sensory behavior and its jeweled ornamentation. From Senegal to Ghana to Burkina Faso, she questions the social and religious symbolism of everyday tools and the new practical uses that develop over time.
Naomi Lulendo has created a set of totemic sculptures in metal, ceramic, concrete and baskestry, evocative of the figure of the Potomitan. This term is a Creole expression referring both to women embodying the pillar of a family structure - but also refers to the central column of a voodoo temple standing as an intermediary between the material and spiritual worlds. Whether a column or a body, the potomitan as architecture and personification also represents, for the artist, a tribute to the maternal figure.
In « Vertigineuses », the artists unfold voluptuous forms, dizzying handmade landscapes revealing the paths they have traveled to shape their own histories, based on hereditary identities and narratives, as well as territories they convoke through distance, memory, and travel. For the first time, Each of them reveals in Selebe Yoon works that transpose their dreams and visions to their true scale. Contemporary oracles, their singing is not prophetic, but audible beyond the confines of the intimate, quenched, legitimate and in praise of sisterhood.
About the curators:
Co-directors of The Chimney (2015-2020), a contemporary art gallery in Brooklyn, New York, Jennifer Houdrouge and Clara Darrason have developed a program focused primarily on in- situ installation commissions working to revitalize former industrial spaces. Over a five-year period, they worked with over 70 artists on 31 exhibitions and three performance and video festivals.
Text copyright: Selebe Yoon
Artist Bio
© Shahrzad Changalvaee
Shahrzad Changalvaee (born in 1983, Iran) is an artist and activist. She received a B.A. in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Tehran University (2006) and her M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University (2015). Since 2023, she has been a lecturer at The Cooper Union and RISD. Changalvaee is co-founder and co-director of From: Iran , an artist-led and feminist platform depicting socio-political landscape of Iran, fighting for radical change.
Changalvaee’s practice responds to sculpture in a vast field of mediums, including installation, video, photography, text, performance as well as activism.
Her works are context-questioning to subjects of many immigrant artists or fluid individuals, subjects such as local and global, information and anecdotes, displacement and adjustment, Interest and urge, privilege and progress. Through summoning, truncating, recalling and tokening, she works in a variety of time-based mediums in search of doubtful appearances of liberty, control and evil.
Changalvaee’s works have been shown in a number of shows in the United States., Middle East and Europe, including her solo installations « In Absentia, in Effigie » at The Chimney, New York (2019) and solo presentation at NADA Foreland with Golestani Gallery, Catskills, New York (2023).
Shahrzad’s work has been featured in several solo and group exhibition including, « A feast of friends », Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany (2022); “The Understandables Always Arrive From Far Away” (2018) at Soho20, Brooklyn; “You Cannot The Same River Twice” (2016) at O Gal-lery, Tehran, Iran; "Ksi, Ein and An, A love Story"(2015), VSC Gallery, SVA (School of Visual Arts), New York, USA; “Future Remnants of a Missing Word” (2016), Meyohas Gallery, New York, USA.
She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
© Morel Donou
Melinda Fourn (b. 1995, France) is a multidisciplinary artist of Franco-Beninese origin.
Drawing on West African artisanal skills in jewelry, metal, ceramics and weaving, her sculptures and multimedia installations question the social and religious symbolism of everyday tools. She graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2021 and completed an exchange program at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana (2020). She participated in several group exhibitions: "The Fire of Origins", Biso Biennale, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (2023); "Diversi-T", Kosmokey, La Cité Fertile, Pantin, FR (2023); "Intention", Azz-Art, Paris FR (2022); "Pièce, Habitation, Abri…" Musée Delacroix, Paris, FR (2022); "Restitution" at the Institut Français, Saint Louis, SN (2022); "100% l'Expo", La Vilette, France (2022), among others. She has benefited from several residencies, including at Selebe Yoon, Dakar (2023) and Villa Saint-Louis Ndar (2022), ArtMéssiamé in Lomé, Togo (2021), Green Patch Ceramics, La Borne, France (2021) and Casa Lü, Ttlaplan, Mexico (2019).
She lives and works between Paris (France), Kumasi (Ghana) and Dakar (Senegal).
© Morel Donou
Naomi Lulendo (b.1994, France) is a French-Guadeloupean-Congolese artist based in Dakar, Senegal. With a multicultural background, the artist traveled between the Caraïbes and France throughout her childhood. From photography, ceramics, installation and video, she uses the concept of “misappropriation” of words, meanings, objects and identity in her work. Naomi Lulendo holds an MFA degree from the Beaux-Arts School of Paris (2018). Throughout her education, Pascale Marthine Tayou became her mentor. She had two solo exhibitions: “Bleu Miroir” at Agences Trames in Dakar (2021); “Faites vos Je” at the Beaux-Arts, Paris (2018).
Her work was included in several group exhibitions : « Dérives en péninsule » at l’Atlas, Paris, France (2023); “D’ailleurs je viens d’ici” curated by Sandrine Honliasso and Ariane Leblanc, at Comédie de Caen, Normandie, France (2021); “On fait des dessins dans la terre” curated by Eva Barois de Caevel, Galerie 31Project, Paris (2021); “L’heure rouge” , 14th Dakar Biennale OFF, Galerie Le Manège, Dakar (2018); “Extrangers”, Tevere Art Gallery, Rome, Italy (2017); “Explosition”, Chapitre 2 at Galleria Continua, les Moulins, France (2016); “Transmissions, Recréation, Répétition” curated by Sarina Basta at Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, France (2015); “Explosition”, Galerie l’Amour, Bagnolet, France (2015); “Transition” curated by Anais de Senneville and Aurélie Tiffreau at Galerie L’inattendue, Paris (2015); “Ici au lieu de là-bas, Maison des ensembles, Paris (2014).
Naomi Lulendo also did several public performances: “Archi(s)pell” at the Le Frac Reims, in France as part of the FAR AWAY Festival (2023); at Bétonsalon, Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris, France (2020); Galerie Allen (2019); Raw Material Company, Dakar, Senegal (2018).
In 2021 she was among the artists selected by Zeitz MOCAA (South Africa) to join "Unfinished Camp", an ongoing international network of artists and nine art institutions on six continents, conceived and directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist and András Szánto. She was also a fellow at the Raw Academie for the fifth session, directed by artist Otobong Nkanga; and at Agence Trames, Dakar (2021).
Attandi Trawalley (born in 1996, Pretoria, South Africa) is a multidisciplinary South African artist.
A graduate of ENSA de la Villa Arson, her practice includes installation, performance, sculpture, and publishing. She is interested in the practices of care, the reappropriation of self, the notions of transmission and everyday gestures through an exploration of black female subjectivities and fragmented family stories.
Her first solo exhibition «Care as a Color » was presented in 2023 at the Consulat Voltaire, Paris, France.
Her work was included in several group exhibitions, including: «Terminus Mutations », La Villa Arson, Nice, France (2022) ;
« Postcorps »,le Centre de Création Contemporaine Olivier Debré, Tours, France (2022); « Gestuelle émotive: vestige de soi», Le génie de la Bastille Gallery, Paris, France (2021); Centre Wallonie, Bruxelles, Belgique (2021); LABO DÉMO FERMÉ 24/24 7/7 Paris, France (2021); Straight Lick - exposition digitale (2020).
Her work will be featured in the group exhibition « 100% » at La Villette, Paris, France in 2024.
She lives and works in Paris, France.
Nelly Zagury (born in 1987 in Paris) is a French artist. Born into a family with multiple Mediterranean cultures - Moroccan, French and Greek - she shares in her work an experience of femininity that transcends the exotic and orientalist imaginary. In a quest for re-enchantment, her paintings and sculptures feature mystical, powerful heroines.
Nelly Zagury studied at HEAR (Haute Ecole des Arts du Rhin) in Strasbourg and the HEAD (Haute Ecole d'art et de design) in Geneva. After working in Paris for a haute couture house and designing jewelry for brands such as Chanel and Boucheron, she moved to New York to design costumes for American artist Matthew Barney's film opera « River of Fundament ». She is the co-founder of the 3D printed jewelry brand Holy Faya (2014-2018) with the support of LVMH and artists such as Rashaad Newsome, Demi Lovato and FKA Twigs. In 2018, Zagury moved to Los Angeles where she worked with the artist Simphiwe Ndzube (Stevenson Gallery Cape Town, Nicodim gallery Los Angeles, Museo Kaluz Mexico) and developed Songs Of My Fantasy, a phantasmagorical opera in two acts in the form of a collection of poems, paintings and sculptures.
Her work were exhibited in major institutions included: MAD Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France ; le Palais Royal (Ministry of Culture and Communication), Paris, France ; le Musée Historique, Strasbourg, France ; le Musée de l’oeuvre Notre-Dame, Strasbourg, France.
Solo exhibitions of Zagury’s work include : «Sisters Of The Sea », Align Gallery, Los Angeles (2019) ; «Songs Of My Fantasy», Brewery Art Complex, Los Angeles (2019) ; «Holy Faya: The Black Crook Grand Premiere», The Chimney, New York (2016); «Sunset Split», 22 rue mulllet, Paris (2013).
Her work was included in numerous group exhibitions, including: «In Her Element», Mash Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); « The Erotic Impulse In The Ever Becoming Universe », Mash Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); « Every Woman Biennal », Superchief Gallery NFT, New York (2021); « Holding Space », Big Pictures Los Angeles (2019); «I’ve always imagined that paradise would be a kind of library», Blake and Vargas, Berlin (2019); The Chimney, New York (2019); «The Crew II», Matthew Barney Studio, New York (2014); «La Peau de l'Ours» au Musée zoologique, Strasbourg, 2011.
Zagury was a resident at Selebe Yoon, Dakar, Senegal (2023); Massa Stories, Agadir, Morocco (2022); Le Wonder, Paris, France (2022).
She lives and works in Paris, France.