World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou

November 2, 2014–March 1, 2015

The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou, a large-scale immersive environment that combines his sculpture, drawings, and poetry with Fowler artworks and recorded sound. Assembled from a stunning diversity of materials and found objects, Tayou’s art is characterized by an aesthetic of accumulation. He pierces Styrofoam with thousands of pins and razorblades, stacks hundreds of birdhouses against a wall, and adorns crystal glass figures with beads, plastic flowers, and feathers. This approach derives in part from the ways African sculpture is empowered with accumulations of materials to assert various kinds of religious, social, and political authority. Tayou uses this aesthetic to raise searching questions about inequalities of wealth and power in today’s postcolonial, global context at the same time he explores the hidden, spiritual forces that infuse ordinary, everyday life in African cities.

World Share is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. Tayou was born in Nkongsamba, Cameroon and lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.

Exhibition In Depth

Press Release

World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou

Exhibition Credits

World Share: Installations by Pascale Marthine Tayou is organized by the Fowler Museum at UCLA and curated by Gemma Rodrigues, Curator of African Arts. Major funding is provided by the Flemish Government, the National Endowment for the Arts, Brenda R. Potter, and the Fay Bettye Green Fund to Commission New Work. Generous support is provided by the Philip L. Ravenhill Fund, the Jay T. Last and Deborah R. Last Endowment, the Pasadena Art Alliance, and Manus, the support group of the Fowler Museum.