Meschac Gaba

Dialogue (1994), a work pre-dating the artist’s time at the Rijksakademie, is characterised by a collage of decommissioned banknotes wrapped around a wooden sculptural form. This ‘relief painting’, created within a vernacular stereotyped as typically African, is a forebear of Gaba’s more recent works such as The Game – Raquette and The Game – Raquette badminton(2012), that also employ shredded CFA or Central Franc Africaine, the currency union of Francophone West African countries, as ‘texture and impasto’ or ‘modelling compound’. Gaba uses currency cosmetically for analytical ends, positioning these works as a questioning of the aesthetics of institutionalised rituals within the globalised marketplace, spanning recreational and visual traditions.