Yaounde Photo Network is pleased to collaborate with OVNi Festival 2022 (Nice’s video art festival) as part of OVNi at the Hotel – Cosmopolis programme.
Initiated at WindsoR Hotel in 2021, Cosmopolis is part of OVNi at the Hotel programme and brings together foreign cultural institutes (under the aegis of FICEP), international cultural centres and the Friends of OVNi. Each institution invites an artist to take over a hotel room and to transform it into an immersive video art experience.
This programme aims to create an encounter between hospitality, artists, professionals, collectors, and the public.
The artist invited by Yaounde Photo Network is Wilfried Nakeu (Cameroon) who is presenting Spiritual Reconnection of African Politics (2022).
Trained in computer sciences, Wilfried Nakeu is a multimedia artist. His practice, which includes performance, music, slam, photography, sculpture, painting and video, draws on common experience and pushes the boundaries between artist, actor and spectator, making the latter a participant in his art.
While interrogating the relationships between humans, Nakeu also looks at our relationship with nature. His work explores environmental and decolonial consciousness, knowledge systems, and African spirituality.
Spiritual Reconnection of African Politics questions African political life by returning to the period of Independence and the debates that marked the decolonisation process. In this work the artist manipulates characters taken from some of his colourful paintings, and animates them so that they become the interpreters of speeches by French, African and Diasporic politicians and thinkers including Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Patrice Lumumba, or Ruben Um Nyobè.
In addition to the video are presented two paintings that are part of the same project, giving another materiality to the artist’s aesthetic universe.
OVNi at the Hotel is on from 3 to 4 December 2022 between 2.00 – 7.00pm.
Professional Preview: 2 December 2.00 – 6.00pm
WindsoR Hotel
11 rue Dalpozzo
06000 Nice
France
Visit OVNi’s website for more information on the festival.
Featured image: Wilfried Nakeu, Spiritual Reconnection of African Politics, 2022. Still from HD video. Courtesy the artist.
