BARTHÉLÉMY TOGUO

‘It all started with a childhood memory. I remembered how I used to get up very early in the morningto fetch water from far away, to drink, to wash the plates at home, back home in Cameroon, beforegoing to school. I was also thinking about the multi-coloured pots and buckets in which I carried theprecious liquid. Ever since I moved to France, these images come back to me regularly. It was thesehardships that made me realise the importance of water in our lives. The installation I created in 2015at the invitation of Peter Gabriel in Charlton Park in England, for the World of Music Arts and Dance(WOMAD), speaks to this past. There I grouped together dozens of buckets of various colours hangingfrom pillars, which were to receive water to grow geraniums.

For my exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly, I created Water Matters. I presented bottles from allover the world and a painted character who receives them and then offers them in return. It wassymbolic way of distributing this precious resource to everyone.

Taking stock of the current problem of the lack of drinking water in many parts of Africa and the rest ofthe world, I decided to transform the exhibition space into an aquatic environment. I love the shape offish and invent other imaginary ones. With the sea in mind, I often draw the blue dotted lines in mywork. I imagine rain and oceans transforming a scene or landscape into a marine universe. I marvel atthe fluidity of the water, which represents a gentle, non-violent world; its colour is undeniably beautiful.These depths are also dangerous, but it’s clear that this substance offers more visual softness than arock, and the same applies to touch. The dream of falling into water rather than onto a rock createsgreater serenity.’¹

Water ‘is an invaluable and vital element that invites us to dream and gives us life’, says the artist,concerned that this resource, which should be a right for everyone, is cruelly lacking in several parts ofthe planet, endangering the living world.

Barthélémy Toguo was born in Mbalmayo, Cameroon, in 1967. Between 1989 and 1993 he studied art,first at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan then in Grenoble, and finally at the Kunstakademie inDüsseldorf. Although he stayed in Europe and became a French citizen, Barthélémy Toguo remainsprofoundly attached to Cameroon, and he regularly returns to the country. That is where he createdBandjoun Station, a foundation inaugurated in 2013 with the aim of hosting artists and academics fromaround the world in residential workshops, to develop propositions in harmony with the localpopulation.

Barthélémy Toguo’s art has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years. His work has found its wayinto the collections of a number of major private and public institutions in the UK, Europe and the USA.Recently, a temporary installation was commissioned under the pyramid at the Louvre Museum in Paris.This summer, his work is on show at a number of venues in Nantes, including the Château des Ducs deBretagne, as part of Expression(s) décoloniale(s) #3, and the HAB Galerie for the Voyage à Nantes.Toguo will be presenting a recent installation at the Autun Biennial in Burgundy, the InternationalFestival of Contemporary Sacred Art, from 15 July.

Water is a Right is the sixth exhibition that Galerie Lelong & Co. has devoted to Barthélémy Toguo since2010, following The Lost Dogs_’_ Orchestra (Paris, 2010), Hidden Faces (Paris, 2013), Strange Fruit (Paris,2017), Urban Requiem (New York, 2019) and Partages (Paris, 2021).

1 Interview with the artist by Androula Michael, Nantes, 13 June 2023.