Fair - Frieze London 2024
9-13 October 2024, Regent's Park, London
Selebe Yoon is pleased to present a solo booth by artist Hamedine Kane for its first participation at Frieze London, Focus Section. Produced during his fellowship at the Villa Médicis - Académie de France in Rome (2023-2024), the works focus on several figures of black American writers who were exiled or traveled to Paris in the 20th century, from W.E.B Dubois, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin to Maya Angelou. Drawing on the legacy of the pan-African encounters of the last century, notably the Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956 and in Rome in 1959, the project takes the form of action research, a speculative inquiry based on a series of testimonies and accounts of the so-called protest novel specific to these writers, while remaining attentive to the experience of violence and of racialized identity expressed in their works.
For Frieze 2024, the work “Home to Home” evokes a finely woven and embroidered canvas shelter in Senegal - a half-studio, half-shelter structure that acts as a receptacle for influential black literary figures within African and Western societies. Working on notions of exile and identity in situations of forced migration, shelters like the one visible in the Calais immigrant camp in the artist's film “The Blue House” (2020) as well as the one presented at Villa Medici and Frieze, represent a space of poetic liberation and political protection. Functioning as an installation where visitors are invited to step it, sit and read, the fabrics incorporate portrait drawings of iconic figures based on archival documents, visual scenes imagined from excerpts of these protest novels, quotations from the same books mixed with the artist's own writings. Inside the work, acting like an itinerant library can be found books, objects collected on the artist's path, slingshots, a school blackboard and woodcuts based on the covers of influential publications, from Frantz Fanon to Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates. The work becomes a “production space”, a meeting point for both historical figures and their literary legacies, as well as for the public invited to reflect on a new historical narrative.
“Today, when you're an artist and have access to production spaces - a position of power, in other words - I think it's essential to ask the question of subversion. How can we ensure that every time we have access to a space for expression, exhibition or production, we find a way of extending it and opening it up to as many people as possible? [...] How can we subvert the spaces we have access to today to multiply the possibilities?”
-Hamedine Kane
OPENING HOURS FRIEZE LONDON
Wednesday Preview, 9 October: 11am - 7pm (invitation only)
Thursday Preview, 10 October: (Members and invitation only preview) 11am – 1pm / (General admission) 1pm - 5pm
Friday, October 11: 11am - 7pm
Saturday, 12 October: 11am - 7pm
Sunday, 13 October: 11am - 6pm