Playing the Market

Hervé Youmbi and the Totems Experiment

French Institute Seminars in Humanities (FISH)
10 March 2015

15:00 – IFAS Conference Room, 62 Juta Street, Braamfontein

Dominique Malaquais
CEMAf-CNRS

In 2010, Cameroonian artist Hervé Youmbi created “Totems to Haunt Our Dreams”, a shifting, morphable space that moves across continents and oceans to tell a politically charged story about what it means to be an artist at work on the global arts scene today. By way of this movable architecture, “Totems” takes to task and debunks a whole cluster of preconceived notions. First among these notions are widely held perceptions about the place of African artists on the world market.

Dominique Malaquais is Senior Researcher at Institut des Mondes Africains (National Centre for Scientific Research / CNRS, Paris) and co-director of SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge).