The Past is a Foreign Country

For immediate release:
July 17, 2015

FIRST NORTH AMERICAN SOLO EXHIBITION FOR FRANÇOIS-XAVIER GBRÉ AT HAVERFORD COLLEGE THIS FALL

HAVERFORD, Pa.—— What kinds of buildings “belong” in Africa? How is a country’s national story told through its architecture? When should the structures of the past be dispensed for the future? The Past is a Foreign Country is the first solo exhibition in North America by the Ivorian artist François-Xavier Gbré, whose photographs from West Africa and France survey relics and narratives of the built environment.

Commissioned for the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College and curated by Brendan Wattenberg, director of exhibitions at The Walther Collection in New York, The Past is a Foreign Country features site-specific installations of immersive wallpaper prints and a highly detailed network of more than 50 studies of buildings and architectural fragments. Central to the exhibition is a selection of images from multiple series Gbré created throughout West Africa between 2009 and 2015, a chronicle of imposing governmental structures, shuttered factories, and unfinished homes.

The past in Gbré’s photographs is foreign and unfinished. Heroic military statues in Bamako, Mali, claim victories for a nation beleaguered by violence. Housing developments in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, seek to erase the memory of an urban slum. A new car becomes the futurist symbol of an emergent middle class. But Gbré doesn’t propose a comprehensive history of French colonialism in West Africa or of the turbulent growth of post-independence African cities. Instead, his images summon the personal experience of public space and the social aspirations encoded in concrete, rebar, clay, and dust.

François-Xavier Gbré was born in 1978 in Lille, France. After studying at the École Supérieure des Métiers Artistiques in Montpellier, he worked in fashion and design photography in Milan. This experience led him to explore African stories through landscape and architecture. Gbré’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions in Africa and Europe, including Abroad, Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria; Surfaces and Fragments, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; DAK’ART: The 11th Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; FLOW, Kyoto City University of Arts Gallery, Japan; We Face Forward: Art from West Africa Today, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, U.K.; Synchronicity II, Tiwani Contemporary, London; and Rencontres de Bamako–The African Biennale of Photography. In September 2015, he will participate in The Lay of the Land, an exhibition on emerging African photographers, at The Walther Collection in New York. Gbré lives and works in Abidjan.

The Past is a Foreign Country will run from Aug. 28 through Oct. 9. Gbré will be on campus for a gallery talk with curator Brendan Wattenberg on Friday, Sept. 4, from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. A reception for the show’s opening will follow from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. For more information on the show, please visit exhibits.haverford.edu/thepastisaforeigncountry.

The Past is a Foreign Country is presented by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities at Haverford College and the Tuttle Creative Residencies Program. The exhibition is accompanied by a monograph with contributions by Nigerian author Emmanuel Iduma, Brendan Wattenberg, and Haverford Associate Professor of Political Science Susanna D. Wing.

Part of the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and located in Whitehead Campus Center, the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery is open Monday through Friday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., and Wednesdays until 8 p.m. For more information, contact Matthew Seamus Callinan, associate director of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and campus exhibitions, at (610) 896-1287 or mcallina@haverford.edu.

Haverford College is located at 370 Lancaster Avenue, Haverford, PA, 19041