Home People Tiffanie Delune: There’s Gold On The Palm Of My Hands March 29th – May 3rd, 2023, Gallery II, Accra, Ghana

Tiffanie Delune: There’s Gold On The Palm Of My Hands March 29th – May 3rd, 2023, Gallery II, Accra, Ghana

The Paris-born visual artist of French, Belgo-Congolese heritage, has lived in many places and resides now in Lisbon, Portugal. During one of our conversations, Tiffanie Delune generously shares with me that Lisbon is the place where she feels ‘most at home’. There is a lot of resilience in how she has created living situations all over the world. After having lived in many cities around the world, somehow Lisbon now, feels like home. She feels ‘cared for there’.

A feeling she describes as incontestably evident during her time in Accra as well. The work flows and things seem to fall into place. A place, a space, sometimes physical but often beyond ‘the physical’, can provide this. A place to go beyond and to ‘let be’. Her ongoing exploration of the Self in different times and places through different lenses guided by these places, evokes freedom, imagination, the otherworldly and her own spirituality. Ghana’s bright days and dark nights have welcomed Delune to express herself in all her abundance and multiplicity. The works express a daringness and fearlessness that stems from a rooted core and cared for inner world.

Being able to come in as the whole complex person you are and dare to let this be seen is what Delune’s new body of work presents us. Tiffanie Delune expresses through her use of bright colours, secure lines, subtle threading, and big scale gestures how she was able to be herself during the residency process. She hereby provided herself with works that capture this completeness. The anger, the love, the sensual, the moderate, the abundance, the bright fire, the air, the earth, and the water. The wholeness of her being. Expanding from an initial focus on personal trauma and childhood experiences, Delune is interested in the magic of storytelling that engages conversations and evokes emotions.

Delune  is  not  afraid.  Not  afraid  to  mix different media. From layering acrylic, oil pastel, paper cuts, to delicate threads that draw colourful lines that form circles and rays. The artist seems to intervene  in  the  already  bright  works  with  this  delicate  material  and  threading  technique.  It, again,  shows  her  versatility.  The  empathy  and  care  that  is  detectable by zooming in, and truly staying  with  and  within  the  work.  Delune invites the viewer and listener, invoking Tina Campt (2017, 2021), to come closer and become comfortable with the complexity of wholeness and with oneself.   She   hereby   taps   further   into   a   kind   of   magic   and   abstraction.  She  is  physically manifesting the magic that is her spirituality, her womanhood, her fire, her sensitivity, her anger, her sensibility. Lovingly embracing all of it in multiplicity.

The canvasses, the textiles, the designs, shapes, and colours corresponding with African textiles, invite a serene wholeness. Delune expresses this rather evident in her latest body of work, made and produced during her residency in Accra. Possibly by virtue of Accra, a space that, as she explains herself, ‘is making her feel good and this translates in the work.’ A kind of common moment magic. Bright light during the day, dark nights but life doesn’t frighten her. She dares to express her softness, her feminine side. Soft, transparent textiles hanging from the ceiling that invite you to come closer and discover details. A gesture that is powerful as much as it is symbolic. Combining different media on the canvasses means reconstructing beauty and its imagination. Most importantly, to stop and take the time to contemplate and process the feelings, the emotional response to the situations that life presents us with. A transformative process able to generate new meanings, give hope and make beauty out of pain, just like the soft waves and coloured lines blossoming all over her canvases.

Tiffanie Delune expresses a fiery enthusiasm and openness to her surroundings, as well as to her inner world. It is exactly that which is vividly visible and listenable in her work. In this exhibition, she showcases her paintings both on large canvases as on smaller scale, in different forms and structures. Working on (stretched) cotton canvas, with materials ranging from acrylic, oil, spray paint, oil pastel, paper cuts, glitter, threads and pen and pencil. The artistic performance of self-discovery is prominent in her work. Delune’s ongoing research into what representation of self might mean is a narrative that continues to be fruitful and interesting. With this new show: ‘There is Gold on the Palms of my Hands’, rethinking roots, belonging and Self through Accra’s bright light and lens, Delune seems to have discovered a new layer of herself. Flux and transformation are ever apparent in this new body of work.

 

There is a certain familiarity in the organic forms she portrays. Feminine forms, circles, lines, connections through threads combined with mystical, unfamiliar, and deformed shapes and figurines. These paintings reflect a soothing balance in their complex boldness. They challenge and hereby deconstruct an imagined reality, as traditional shapes that remind us of feminine body parts and draw the viewer to the matter in a way that seems to challenge the assumptions of what is natural and inherent. Do however not mistake the bright colours, forms, and different materials, packed and bursting with intensity, for chaos. As Edouard Glissant states: ‘I call chaos-world the current clash of so many cultures that embrace each other, push each other away, disappear, yet remain, fall asleep or transform, slowly or at lightning speed.’ The kind of ‘chaos-world’ Delune so generously and carefully embraces. The longer you sit with the works, engage with them, and embrace them, the more you will encounter the calm, rest, and tranquillity Delune offers. A harmonious, complex wholeness that provides a challenge to the idea of reality being undecided and therefore allows for unfixed, fluid answers to questions about being and womanhood, older than life itself.

–Curatorial essay by Rita Ouédraogo

About the artist

(b.1988, France. Lives and works in between Accra and Lisbon)

Expanding from  an  initial  focus  on  personal  trauma  and  childhood  experiences,  Delune  is interested  in  the  magic  of  storytelling  that  engages  conversations  and  evokes  emotions.  Her debut solo  exhibition  with  the  gallery  is  currently  on  show  in  Accra,  Ghana.  Previous solo presentations include  ‘See  Me  Flowing’,  Band  of  Vices,  Los  Angeles,  USA  (2022);  ‘There’s Gasoline in My Heart’, Foreign Agent, Lausanne, Switzerland (2022); ‘Seeds of Light’, Ed Cross Fine  Art,  London,  UK  (2020)  and  ‘Metamorphosis’,  Someth1ng  Gallery,  London,  UK  (2019). Group exhibitions include, ‘UNLIMITED’, Gallery 1957, Accra, Ghana (2022); ‘The Storytellers’, Gallery 1957, London, UK (2022); ‘Mother Nature’, The Core Club, New York (2022); ‘Her Dark Materials’, Online with Eye Of The Huntress, London, (2021); ‘In The Beginning’, Online with Ed Cross Fine Art, London (2021); ‘Shape of the New’, Online with ArtCan, London (2021) and ‘In The Midst of All That Is’, Band of Vice, Los Angeles (2021).

In 2022, Delune  was  nominated  for  the  2023  Norval  Sovereign  African  Art  Prize.  Between January and March 2023, the artist was in residency with Gallery 1957, Accra. In 2021, Delune was nominated for the Reiffers Art Initiative Prize in Paris, France and in 2018, she completed a residency with 16/16 in Lagos, Nigeria. Delune has been featured on Forbes, BBC Radio London, The Financial  Times,  The  Evening Standard, Cultured Magazine, Artillery Magazine and Artsy. Her work  is  held  in  various  private collections and the permanent collections of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art in Geneva, Switzerland as well as the Alexandra Cohen Presbyterian Hospital for Women and Newborns in New York and The Women’s Art Collection of the Murray Edwards College at Cambridge University, UK.

 

About Gallery 1957

Based in Accra, with  a  London  outpost  opened in 2020, Gallery 1957 has a curatorial focus on West  Africa.  Presenting a  programme  of  exhibitions,  installations  and  performances  by  the region’s  most  significant  artists,  the  gallery  serves  as a vital platform, promoting West Africa’s presence   within   the   art   scene   by   hosting   ambitious   exhibitions,   providing   resources   for residencies  and  participating  in  international  art  fairs.  Founded by Marwan  Zakhem  in  2016, Gallery  1957  has  evolved  from  over  15  years  of  private  collecting.  The gallery now hosts three spaces  in  Accra  –  one  in  the  Kempinski  Hotel  and  two  in  the  Galleria  Mall  –  and  a  London outpost in Hyde Park Gate.

 

Artist: Tiffanie Delune

Title: There’s Gold On The Palm Of My Hands

Dates: 29th March – 3rd May 2023

Opening Reception: Wednesday, 29th March, 2023, 6pm – 9pm

 

Address: Gallery 1957, Accra, Gallery II Kempinski Hotel Gold Coast and Galleria Mall PM 66 – Ministries

Gamel Abdul Nasser Avenue Ridge – Accra

Ghana

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