La Biennale de Montréal — The Grand Balcony

Em'kal Eyongakpa

From October 20, 2016 to January 14, 2017
Opening on October 20 at 8:30 pm

La Biennale de Montréal and Dazibao present the work of Em’kal Eyongakpa in the context of BNLMTL 2016 — The Grand Balcony.

Curator: Philippe Pirotte

Le Grand Balcon draws loosely on Jean Genet’s Le Balcon, in which the play’s high porch is a space of contestation between revolution and counter-revolution, reality and illusion. A recurring motif in Genet’s writing, his balcony is a place where representation itself can be perversely troubled.

Born in Cameroun, Em’kal Eyoungakpa uses video to question identity and the human condition in a rather instrospective way. His images offer a surrealistic poetic universe, often contemplative, which in his recent works evoke transgenerational memories, ethnobotany and cosmology. 

After graduating in Botany and Ecology at the University of Yaoundé, he rapidly turns to visual and sound art. The following works were recently shown in solo exhibitions: SUN is the MOON (Goethe Institut, Cameroun), security – Greatmore (Cape Town, South Africa), [dis] placement (Institut français du Cameroun), and Negotiations (Kadist, Paris). He took part in group exhibitions including Bring the Noise (London and Ouganda), the 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art (Germany), Evil Under the Sun (Volcano Extravaganza, Italy), Diasporic Self: Sound as Lingua Franca (Framer Framed, Amsterdam). 

Em’kal Eyongakpa’s work wanders through a cosmic universe populated by images, text and music that are strongly imbued with a Cameroonian identity. The video presented at Dazibao in the context of BNLMTL 2016 – The Grand Balcony represents a fragment of a larger body of work entitled Letters from Etokobarek.