Georges Adéagbo
The Pythagorean Age
11. August – 7. Oktober 2001

Photo: Robert Fleischanderl

Georges Adéagbo, who is showing in Austria for the first time, will create an installation for the glass-covered hall on the ground floor of the Gallery. Adhering to his artistic principle, he will incorporate historical and cultural references to Innsbruck/Austria in this installation by introducing explicit allusions to specific themes and by using the objects and texts he discovers here – on the streets, at flea markets or at bookshops – which he sees as relating to Africa and the issue of his installation. Thus it consists of an arrangement of objects some of which he has brought with him from Africa and others that he has taken from the local context. Adéagbo had a sign painter in Cotonou (Benin) paint pictures of selected illustrations (e.g., photographs taken from books and newspapers) and texts that have a special meaning for him in the context of the installation.

The objects, texts and pictures that Adéagbo uses for his installation are manifold, but at the same time limited and clearly defined. The illustrations he commissions are based on the collection of material in his reference library: books, journals, catalogues and brochures that have accumulated over the decades.

Adéagbo opens up a paradoxical field of fictions that informs the various phantasms of the Other in (post) colonial discourses which in this sense are also always highly political ones. Here, however, it is methodologically essential that the selection of his themes is just as sophisticated as his way of staging the objects he has selected in a temporary order that is always revocable. In his mise-en-scène, semantic networks are constructed that contrast with each other and expectations raised that can be dashed or redirected again by the artist.

The Pythagorean Age, the theme of the installation at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck, provides Adéagbo with a point of departure for 'inventing' a speculative structure that he uses to interpret historical processes and events in the history of Central Europe and Africa. Just as Pythagoras identified objects with numbers so as to determine their essence and structure on the basis of the numeric relationships between them, Adéagbo arranges fifty portraits of historical figures in a sort of gallery of paintings and ancestral portraits. Here one finds pioneers and 'heroes' (monsters) who in a real or fictive way have influenced the historical destiny of towns, countries and continents. Only by virtue of a numeric system are they now able to relate to each other in an incommensurable sense.

"For Georges Adéago 'The Pythagorean Age', the piece he has created for Innsbruck, is an opportunity to present his interpretation of the processes that have led up to the emergence, unification, suppression and dissolution of territories and of political and philoso-phical systems. The interplay and the collision of different forces fascinate Adéagbo. Thus the Inn Valley, the traditional axis connecting northern and southern Europe, which has a very rich history, provides a suitable setting for him to explore and collect traces." Stephan Köhler, 2001, excerpts from the catalogue text

Georges Adéagbo
was born in 1942 in Benin. He lives and works in Cotonou, Benin.

Film Program
Mark Nash, co-curator of the documenta 11, will put together a film program that will refer directly to the exhibition Adéagbo. The films will be shown in the last week of the exhibition. (In collaboration with Leokino / Cinematograph, Innsbruck).