Assoukrou Aké

Assoukrou Aké works in sculpture, installation, printmaking and textile without setting up any hierarchy between these practices. They answer one another, extend one another and at times contradict one another. Printmaking carries with it the question of the imprint and of repetition; textile brings in transmission, covering, assemblage; sculpture introduces weight, volume, physical presence. These mediums are therefore never mere supports. They take full part in the way the artist questions what remains of a history once it has been displaced, fragmented or partly erased.

For several years, Aké has been building what he calls a “healing narrative”. The term might suggest a wish to repair. It designates rather a way of returning to certain histories without claiming to resolve them. His family history, the silences that go with it, the movements between Côte d’Ivoire and France mingle with wider narratives: those of colonisation, of representations of Africa, of medicine, of political violence and of transmission. The personal is never far away, but it does not take the form of a confession. Aké uses it as a point of entry into narratives larger than himself.

His works are peopled with images that seem to have already lived several lives. A reference to African mythology may sit alongside a European engraving, a press photograph, a religious motif or the memory of an orally transmitted story. This could make an inventory. It produces instead a palimpsest. Some images remain immediately recognisable; others seem to have lost part of their origin along the way. Aké does not always seek to reconcile them. He prefers to keep something of their mutual strangeness. It is often in this imperfect proximity, in this slight misalignment between two regimes of images, that his work becomes most precise.

Among the figures that recur in his work are characters whose faces are replaced by spirals. One might see in them the rings of a tree, a fingerprint, or a way of withdrawing the face from identification. For Aké, these lines also speak of time and of lineage. They make the face less a portrait than a surface of inscription. The individual partly disappears, but something of his history remains. These figures are anonymous without being deprived of memory.

The horse also returns often, particularly in the prints. It is an ancient, laden figure: that of conquests, processions, power and heroic tales. Aké takes it up without keeping its majesty intact. His horses sometimes seem to carry the very weight of the imagination they embody. They move forward with history on their backs. Power then becomes ambiguous: it already contains the possibility of its fall.

There is in his work an evident taste for what he calls the “counter-gesture”. Remaking a known form, but differently. Using a material where it is not expected. Repeating a motif until it stops producing the same meaning. Shifting a symbol just enough for its self-evidence to blur. He also speaks of “the reverse”, not as a secret reality to be revealed, but as what one begins to see when looking at an image from another history.

This attention to displacement is essential. Aké does not destroy the images he borrows; he knocks them off their axis. He temporarily takes away their comfort. A historically dominant form can become fragile; a material deemed secondary can suddenly occupy the space; a familiar symbol can lose its authority when it meets a narrative that had until then been foreign to it. It is less an art of quotation than an art of decentring.

Memory thus appears less as a subject than as a working method. It returns in fragments, through repetitions, sometimes through anamnesis. Nothing is truly restored to its first state. The eras themselves intermingle: the colonial past, an older mythology, a contemporary experience or an image found today can belong to one and the same work. This heterochrony gives his work a particular temporality. The past is never held at a distance. It insists in the present.

“The characters I bring into existence in my work form, fragment by fragment and radiating outwards, an archive of African consciousness that mingles the sacred and the profane the better to reveal the essence of human life, that of a fragmentary identity still to be reinvented,” the artist explains. This idea of the archive matters, provided it is not understood in a documentary sense. The one Aké builds is lacunary, subjective, at times contradictory. It gathers precisely what resists the single narrative.

Perhaps this is where his work holds: in this refusal to fill the gaps too quickly. An interrupted history is not artificially reconstructed. A wounded image is not returned to its original state. Aké works with the gap itself, as if it could become a form.

This is how his “healing narrative” should be understood. Not as the promise of mending what has been broken, but as the possibility of producing something out of what remains incomplete. In his hands, the work does not close history. It gives it another surface on which to go on appearing.

Winner of the ellipse Prize in 2022, Assoukrou Aké has taken part in several residency programmes, and his work has been shown in France, Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Germany, Spain and China. His recent presentations include Bleu de Chine at Yishu 8, Paris, and Ce qui brille derrière la nuit at the Maison des Arts of Yishu 8 in China in 2026; El Árbol – Raíces, Conexión y Trascendencia at the Casa de Velázquez in 2025; Les graines de semence ne doivent pas être moulues at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan, in 2024; La noche de la frontera in Madrid, Jeune Création at the Espace Niemeyer and Moi – L’autre at the Ateliers du Plessix-Madeuc in 2023. His work has also been presented at AKAA with Ellipse Art Projects, at the Biennale artpress at MO.CO. Montpellier, at EUARCA+ alongside documenta fifteen in Kassel, and in the exhibition About Now #2 at Galerie Cécile Fakhoury in Abidjan in 2022.