About
Pélagie Gbaguidi (from Benin, born in Dakar in 1965), lives and works in Brussels. Gbaguidi calls herself a contemporary griot - a West-African storyteller.
In the poetic sense, the “griot” absorbs the words of the elders, reshapes them like a ball of fat, and deposits them in the belly of the passerby, along with the ingredients of the time.
Her paintings, writings, drawings, and installations are reflections on individual and collective memory. Her work adds a new line to colonial and post-colonial history, where traces of trauma, symbols, associations, and new composite archetypes run counter to the official version and circumvent the oppression, abomination, and legacy of this past. Drawing on her knowledge of archives, she recontextualizes what happened in the past in order to break the chain of injustice that has continued ever since.
Among Pélagie Gbaguidi’s most recent solo exhibitions are 'Antre', La Verrière – Fondation Hermès, Brussels, Belgium (2025) and 'Murmurations', Musée d’art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne – Château de Rochechouart, France (2024).
The artist has also taken part in relevant group shows at HKW in Berlin, SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, Kunstmuseum Basel, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, Centre Pompidou-Metz and WIELS in Brussels, as well as the São Paulo and Istanbul Biennial of 2025, the Berlin Biennial (2020), the Lubumbashi Biennial (2019), Dakar Biennial (2004, 2006, 2008, 2014 and 2018) and documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens (2017).