Artists in residence

Justine Gaga lives and works in Douala. She is the multiform artist practising painting, sculpture, installations,performance, video and photography. She is project manager at Artbakery. The plinth of her work is the notion of loneliness with connected themes such as exile, isolation, immigration, as well as notions of psychological fences and borders.

Right after high school, where she studied mathematics and science, she encountered some artists, notably Joe Kessy and Angel, who fed her passion for visual arts; that’s how she decided to enter a two year workshop in visual arts at Viking’s Studio (Viking is a local doyen in visual arts). In 2003, she trained in photography and visual arts at Pierre Metambou’s Studio in Yaoundé, and in 2005 that she enter residency in ArtBakery (a contemporary laboratory for creation) founder by Goddy Leye, that residency turned out to be most important because it gave her access to a formal education and expertise in visual arts, at a moment when her means did not allow me such a path.

She participate to the project ExitTour which the same forged her and allowed her to grow professionally. Thus, it is following to that project that she’s started many residencies of creation. Her professionalization then happened through personal readings and research, creative workshops, and residencies of international creations.

Her work have been shown in several countries, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana,Togo, Mali, Botswana, Senegal, South Africa, Colombia, Spain, USA, France, Germany, Holland, Italie.

Pierre-Man’s is a Congolese artist who lives and works in Congo.

Photographer and performer, Pierre-Man’s main subject is the body.

Through her works, this young multidisciplinary artist chooses the conditions of her vision. Photography can be a medium that reveals her body, which she ritualises and stages to confront the reality of a troubled existence. Her world is predominantly red and her anger recalls a certain violence of the world. Over the years, she has developed her own visual identity with an increasingly present textual heritage and has tried her hand at various artistic experiments, including performance art.

Contemporary African artists seek an image where the place of the subject is central. Witnesses of their time, they exhume a long-kept secret narrative that we try to keep under silence. They assemble memories and memoirs that can lead to transformation and liberation. In the performances of the artist Pierre Man’s, the aesthetics of the body becomes calligraphy in space. She takes up the registers of a traditional culture that she revisits and denounces existing social realities from which Congolese society suffers, bringing her subjects to sexuality, to the body, to the woman facing society and questioning.

Pierre-Man’s art is a reconstructive therapy, a resistance that aims at resilience. Every gesture counts. She creates the plastic elements of her stories and the intention to carry the body, to reveal it by the requirement of a staging shows how art that is exposed is a “serious” and critical thing from one context to another, from one world to another.