JOHANNES SIVERTSEN & MODOU DIENG YACINE

Homesick

April 26 - June 8, 2024

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In the duo exhibition Homesick, SPECTA presents new works by Johannes Sivertsen and Modou Dieng Yacine.  Both artists live in exile, far from where they grew up: Johannes Sivertsen, who comes from a Parisian suburb, now lives in Copenhagen, while Modou Dieng Yacine, who grew up in Saint Louis, Senegal, now lives in Chicago. Both artists are looking at their home countries from their current locations in a complex state of longing and worry. In the exhibition Homesick, they each return to their starting point, to take a critical look at the urban spaces of their childhood and the stories they hide.

A series of works by Modou Dieng Yacine has a specific building, located in Saint Louis, where he grew up, as a recurring base. This building was the headquarters for the French colonial government in Senegal. It stands as a monument, a testimony and as such an unavoidable reminder to history. Yacine paints on silkscreen prints of the building, and the bright applied colors both erase, blur and frame the building. It is as if the building is a center of rotation, which cannot seem to go away.

Some of Johannes Sivertsen’s paintings also have architecture as a motif, he continues to return to. The suburb in the outskirts of Paris, where he grew up with large housing blocks in concrete, a topology which has become a symbol of the division between “them” and “us” in many European cities today. Them and us being predominantly the immigrants and descendants of the colonized as opposed to the French colonizers. However, in his paintings, Johannes Sivertsen depicts the everyday lives of the people living there. They too walk to school, fall in love and are simply on their way from A to B.

The paintings by Johannes Sivertsen and the works on paper by Modou Dieng Yacine in this exhibition seem saturated with motifs. The two artists clearly work in different ways and the expressions are influenced by the perspectives which have shaped their lives. Sivertsen’s works reminiscence historical European painting and the works by Yacine are influenced by both his Senegalese background as well as his many years in the US. The common ground the two artists have is their interest in the era of French colonies, and not least the strong presence this era has in today’s societies and individuals; Sivertsen and Yacine grew up in territories marked by stories that are not told and by traumas that are not represented.

Johannes Sivertsen (FR, 1984) was educated at Ateliers Beaux-Arts de la Glacière, Paris, and Funen Art Academy in Odense, Denmark. He has done a number of exhibitions, most recently Immortelle at MO.CO.Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier 2023, Anti-Identité (solo) at Gilles Drouault Galerie in Paris (2022), Toubab (solo) in SPECTA 2021, The Unnamed (solo) in 2020 at Overgaden - Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, I:Project Space (Beijing) a.o.. Sivertsen has been awarded with several grants, and he is currently receiving a three-year work grant from the Danish Arts Agency. Johannes Sivertsen is represented in the collection of the Danish Arts Agency and The Collection of the City of Copenhagen. Johannes Sivertsen currently lives and works between Copenhagen and France.

Modou Dieng Yacine (SN, 1970) was educated at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, Senegal, and the San Francisco Arts Institute in California. Yacine has exhibited extensively across the US and Europe as well as repeatedly at the Dakar Biennale. He was professor and director of the Department of Arts and Painting for 10 years at the Pacific Northwestern College of Art in Portland, Oregon Modou Dieng Yacine is represented in numerous collections, among them are the collections of the Studio Museum in New York, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, Gervanne and Mathias Lerind Collection and Fondation Gandur. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is also co-founder of and curator for Blackpuffin.