Remember Bimbia, a site-specific installation by BelgianCameroonian artist, Pascale Marthine Tayou opened at the Redwood Library & Athenaeum today. The outdoor sculpture, a remembrance of a major slave market in Cameroon, launches the Redwood’s Material Politics initiative, a three-year slate of outdoor installations, art exhibitions, lectures, symposia and public programs devoted to plumbing the political and social implications of the materials and processes of contemporary art. Commissioned by the Redwood Contemporary Arts Initiative (RCAI), Remember Bimbia is one of Tayou’s few public installations in the United States, and the artist’s first slavery memorial. Remember Bimbia recalls a onetime slave market, now nearly overgrown by equatorial forest overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Tayou’s native country of Cameroon. Tayou’s call to memory serves not only as a
|
