JULIAN FARADE
"Sur le fil : broderie et tissage"
In collaboration with the 19M Chanel Métiers d'Art, Julian Farade pursues his work in embroidery and weaving crafts and exhibits for the first time in Dakar.
From January 14 to March 31, 19M launches its first international programme and sets up an off-site gallery in Dakar to celebrate the richness and diversity of embroidery and weaving crafts at the Institut fondamental d'Afrique noire (IFAN) in the Musée Théodore Monod d'Art Africain.
Between contemporary creation and traditional savoir-faire, the international programme consists of a collective exhibition with works and installations across different media, created by numerous contemporary artists and artisans from Senegal but also from Mali, South Africa, Bolivia and France.
The works created by Julian Farade attest the story of an encounter. Of an unprecedented collaboration between a French-based visual artist, a Senegalese stylist and the embroiderers of the village of Ngaye Méckhé, a hundred kilometers north of Dakar. The chaos of movement and color that clashes in Julian Farade's canvases has been domesticated by the geometric shapes of the embroidery designs, made exclusively by women in this village known for its embroidery, shoemaking and basketry crafts. Julian threw on the ivory-coloured Malikane cotton swatches – usually embroidered and used by women to carry children on the back – forms between figuration and abstraction that sometimes give rise to suns, houses or strange animals. The Designer Khadija Ba then picked up four of the loinclothes she worked on with her loyal embroiderer Adji Fall Wade, who owns her studio at Geule Tapée, a Dakar neighborhood. They both married Julian's work. Six other loincloths went to the village of Ngaye Méckhé and met fifteen embroiderers. Each pattern has its own name and the thread used is mischievously called in Wolof nitou tay, "people of nowadays" in English. Because when this cheap thread is unrolled, its hue is changing, more or less clear. Thus are the people of nowadays: changeable... These crossings have given rise to this hybrid installation which mixes in the same creative impulse art and craft.
The new works and collaborations will later be exhibited at Galerie du 19M in Paris/Aubervilliers in 2023.
