Espace Medina, Dakar, Senegal
The exhibition was part of the art festival Partcours, an annual cultural event in Dakar. It consisted of fourteen new paintings on canvas and textile, in addition to a photo book. All the works were a reworking of the material I collected in Saint-Louis that same year, where through painting I attempted to convey a visual essence of my experiences and my perspective: My perspective as a Western European and as a woman.
n February 2022, I participated in a one-month artist residency at the Waaw Institute of Art in Saint-Louis, Senegal. After a long drive from Dakar, the first thing that greeted me in Saint-Louis was a trampled fur-lined Gucci sandal. A motif that, for me, holds many layers of meaning and, in a way, came to summarize my entire stay. This was my fifth time in Africa, but culturally, it was the most different.
The purpose of my stay in Saint-Louis was to work with postcolonial architecture and wall paintings. After a few days, I quickly became interested in people’s sense of fashion and the generally well-dressed population. I perceived the widespread use of counterfeit luxury brands from major European fashion houses as a kind of democratization of fashion – a freedom within the unregulated. This stands in stark contrast to Norway, where everything is so regulated, and the sale of replicas is prohibited.
But it’s not just fashion that is unregulated – the entire society largely consists of small micro-businesses: selling baguettes from the trunk of a car, pop-up cafés/restaurants wherever space allows, traveling tailors. I see these micro-businesses as a way for people to take control of their own situation. From my perspective, it feels like freedom – though from the outside, our welfare state in Norway would be seen as freedom. Because we have the freedom to choose.