Homesick
Johannes Sivertsen & Modou Dieng Yacine
April 26th - June 8th 2024
SPECTA

In the duo exhibition Homesick, SPECTA presents new works by Johannes Sivertsen and Modou Dieng Yacine.  Both artists live in exile, far from where they grew up: Johannes Sivertsen, who comes from a Parisian suburb, now lives in Copenhagen, while Modou Dieng Yacine, who grew up in Saint Louis, Senegal, now lives in Chicago. Both artists are looking at their home countries from their current locations in a complex state of longing and worry. In the exhibition Homesick, they each return to their starting point, to take a critical look at the urban spaces of their childhood and the stories they hide.

A series of works by Modou Dieng Yacine has a specific building, located in Saint Louis, where he grew up, as a recurring base. This building was the headquarters for the French colonial government in Senegal, where the govenor Faidherbe was a brutal administrator of the French colonies in 1854-1865. It stands as a monument, a testimony and as such an unavoidable reminder to history. Yacine paints on silkscreen prints of the building, and the bright applied colors both erase, blur and frame the building. It is as if the building is a center of rotation, which cannot seem to go away.

Some of Johannes Sivertsen’s paintings also have architecture as a motif, he continues to return to. The suburb in the outskirts of Paris, where he grew up with large housing blocks in concrete, a typology which has become a symbol of the division between “them” and “us” in many European cities today. Them and us being predominantly the immigrants and descendants of the colonized as opposed to the French colonizers. However, in his paintings, Johannes Sivertsen depicts the everyday lives of the people living there. They too walk to school, fall in love and are simply on their way from A to B.

The paintings by Johannes Sivertsen and the works on paper by Modou Dieng Yacine in this exhibition seem saturated with motifs. The two artists clearly work in different ways and the expressions are influenced by the perspectives which have shaped their lives. Sivertsen’s works reminiscence historical European painting and the works by Yacine are influenced by both his Senegalese background as well as his many years in the US. The common ground the two artists have is their interest in the era of French colonies, and not least the strong presence this era has in today’s societies and individuals; Sivertsen and Yacine grew up in territories marked by stories that are not told and by traumas that are not represented.