Nanténé Traoré
She says it’s the high energy
In collaboration with Sultana, Paris as part of Condo, London
20 January - 17 February 2024
... and just as it’s always impossible to stand still while the universe continues to spin, it’s equally unthinkable to go on living for the beauty of the gesture, intolerable, moreover, not to look for a deeper reason, a sub- terranean murmur that would explain our being in the world, something that would transcend - and as we move forward, uncertain, in the terrors under the sea or in the depths of our cellars, searching for meaning but never finding it, a voice emerges in the clatter, something that tells us that it’s not beauty or horror that moors us here, nor our bodies or our skins, since we are limitless, it’s in the movement of all things that we reside forever, it’s to inhabit speed, she says, it’s the high energy.
Nanténé Traoré, 2023
Nanténé tells stories, with words and images. Borrowing from the storyteller’s art his work seeks to create a living documentation of the present, and a new iconography of the intimate. In his photos, as in his texts, the same motifs unfold – stories of tenderness, transmission and freedom, narrated by bodies in motion, de-normed, volatile. Through this work of repetition, both in terms of technique and in the creative process of his textual and visual works, the artist creates a universe in the round, where a succession of obsessive images, endlessly repeated gestures and words all serve an incessant quest to get it right – to get ever closer to that nerve centre of individual narratives, where the story of the other becomes the universal story.
Nanténé Traoré was born near the ocean side, in 1993. After gratuated from a DNAP (op. printing and visual arts) at ESBANM in 2016, Nanténé moves to Paris, where he lives and works today. He is represented by Sultana, in Paris, and has been published by Hachette editions, Points editions and Gorge Bleue, in France.