Titles:
Bill Kouélany | Carnet de la Création
Hervé Yamguen | Carnet de la Création
Hervé Youmbi | Carnet de la Création
Published with: Editions de l’Oeil (Paris, France)
Release: March 2011
SPARCK is proud to present the latest 3 manifestations of its continued partnership with Editions de l’Oeil: 3 new volumes of the Carnets de la Création series featuring 3 SPARCK artists: Bill Kouélany (Congo Brazzaville) who, together with fellow artist Goddy Leye, embarked on SPARCK’s first Diasporic residency to Guangzhou/ China; Hervé Yamguen (Cameroon), whose work featured in IMAG[IN]ING CITIES exhibition in Karachi/ Pakistan and Hervé Youmbi (Cameroon), creator of the multi-city installation “Totems to Haunt Our Dreams”.
Each volume includes bilingual text (French-English). Authors are: Nicolas Martin-Granel (Bill Kouélany volume), one of Europe’s most distinguished specialists of contemporary Congolese culture; Lionel Manga (Hervé Yamguen volume), Douala-based essayist, novelist, journalist, radio host, hip hop impressario, cultural activist and SPARCK artist in residence (Photographic Journeys Karachi / IMAG[IN]ING CITIES); Dominique Malaquais (Hervé Youmbi volume), SPARCK Director.
The books are available online:
B. Kouélany: https://www.editionsdeloeil.com/product-page/bill-kou%C3%A9lany
H. Yamguen: https://www.editionsdeloeil.com/product-page/herv%C3%A9-yamguen
H. Youmbi: https://www.editionsdeloeil.com/product-page/herv%C3%A9-youmbi
Bill Kouélany (born Brazzaville, Congo, 31 October 1965) creates the way surgeons cut, looking hard, scalpel in hand. Her gaze is tough and ironic. Her work is an exercise in the impossible, a walk on the wild side of chaos. It goes deep into the intimate, questioning intersections between self and other. Incised, shredded, patched up, her canvases are akin to skins: the visible side of jagged cuts.
Something is always screaming in the pictorial universe of Hervé Yamguen (born Douala, Cameroon, 1971): an endless Technicolor scream swirling through a mindboggling world. But in Cameroon, AKA Bribeland, who save the very occasional listener hears his cry? In a mad dash across media – painter, draughtsman, photographer, performance artist – takes immense risks to call forth in the language of art.
Hervé Youmbi (born 1973) knows this well: to be an artist in the 21st century is to have truck with markets. It doesn’t mean you can win, though: beating the house at its own game is rarely an option. This too he knows. If, in younger years, he may have believed that art was salvation, today he has doubts; he believes and doesn’t believe and the result is an engaged practice, at once playful and ironic, worried, worrisome and at times violent. Violence and alienation are key themes in Youmbi’s work, alongside the bitter-sweet hope that one day those whom the colony silenced will see their names celebrated in the ever-presence of a colony that refuses to die – the bitter-sweet hope of a day when human beings will no longer gives their lives in exchange for the dream of a visa or their names for a bar code spit out by authorities determined to bigbrotherise the planet.
FR 
EN