Pascale Marthine Tayou

Pascale Marthine Tayou work mines popular visual culture and social practices, using improvisational methods to construct installations relentlessly focused on the political and social conditions of postcolonial Africa.
He gave himself two first names Pascale and Marthine that he feminized. He studied law, hoping it would lead to a kind of purity, but fled the profession when he realized that the system was corrupt. He then turned to art, despite his suspicision that it didn’t exist. Tayou’s work is based on the premise that art cannot be separated from life. His site-specific installations recycle every kind of material, object, and image to testify to the continuous circulation of people throughout the world, their personal history and their culture. He refers to these projects as collective works, the result of that which he notices, of what happens to him in everyday life, a sum total of journeys, encounters, energy, chance and spontaneity.