Meschac Gaba

Biography

The turning point came from a bag of money. It held banknotes withdrawn from circulation and cut into confetti, and the young artist from Benin, who by then had all but drifted away from the painting he had trained in, began making pictures out of them. Ever since, the banknote has been his main motif and material: he glues it into objects, alters it, hangs it on wire, lays it out on tables.

The artist’s full name is Ekué Woekedje Meschac Gaba. He was born in 1961 in Cotonou.

He first taught himself to paint, then studied in the workshop of the painter Zossou Gratien. After his first exhibitions in Benin, in 1990 a foundation invited him to France, and Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire followed. In 1996 he was accepted for a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, and Dutch collections bought his first works.

There was nowhere for him to exhibit in Amsterdam, so for the next five years he built a museum of his own. This became the “Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997–2002”, twelve rooms filled with objects he made himself. Some rooms reproduce the usual services of a museum: there is a gift shop, a café, a library of art books that also tells the story of his childhood. Others are personal. The Game Room is made up of sliding-puzzle tables on which the movable squares form the flags of African countries. In the Art and Religion room “classic” African ceremonial sculpture stands beside kitsch from Buddhist and Christian shops. Picasso’s face appears on African banknotes, a Swiss bank is laid out like a street market, chicken legs are cast in ceramic and gilded. Running through all the rooms is an almost confessional account of what it is like for an artist to live between Africa and Europe. Gaba himself saw the museum as making up for what was missing: art education in Africa and African art beyond the continent. The Wedding Room keeps, as museum exhibits, mementoes of his own wedding, held in 2000 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam as part of an exhibition and documented as a performance.

The museum was first shown in part in 2002 at documenta 11, where the curator Okwui Enwezor included Gaba’s work. In 2009 it was exhibited at the Fridericianum in Kassel. He was given a space in Rotterdam to store it, where he also lived. In 2013 Gaba sold and donated most of the museum to Tate Modern, which showed it in full as part of its programme of exhibitions devoted to Africa; only the library he took back to Cotonou. The British critic Jonathan Jones called the museum an autobiography, a novel and a protest all at once. In 2014 it was shown at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle in Berlin.

In 2003 Gaba was one of five artists representing the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale. His work was also seen at other biennials, in 2006 in Havana, São Paulo and Sydney, and in the touring exhibition “Africa Remix” (2004–2007). His first solo exhibition in the United States took place in 2005 at the Studio Museum in Harlem: for the series “Tresses”, working with a Beninese hair braider from his own photographs, he made models of buildings in New York and Benin out of artificial braids. An accessory that had become fashionable among African American pop stars under the influence of West African culture thus returned to Africa. “Boulangerie Africaine” (2004) is about the baguette, brought to Benin by the French colonisers: it has long been part of the local cuisine, although wheat is not grown there. To my mind, the whole of his manner can be seen in this bakery: a funny object with a long history behind it.

In the exhibition “Exchange Market” at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York in 2014 there were ten tables of unvarnished wood, each with a wire umbrella stand hung with African banknotes, and each table stood for its own commodity: cotton, cocoa, diamonds. Upstairs there were four foosball tables, as in the Game Room of his museum. Later came the exhibitions “L’homme et l’argent” in Paris (2017), “Voyage au long cours” at the FRAC Normandie in Caen (2019) and “Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste” at the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris (2021).