BIENNALE DI VENEZIA
2024
In 2024, I was invited to exhibit at the 60th Venice Biennale as a guest artist within the Cameroon Pavilion. My work, Frames of Reference, remained on display throughout the Biennale—an extraordinary milestone in my artistic journey. Part self-portrait and part visual fairy tale, the piece explores how the places we inhabit, the stories we inherit and the experiences that transform us become the frames through which we understand ourselves.
My Story
In autumn 2023, I learned that the theme of the upcoming Venice Biennale would be Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque. It immediately felt both important and deeply personal. I was given the opportunity to create an artwork responding to the theme and submit it for consideration.
At the time, I had already begun working on an autobiographical piece that seemed to belong within this conversation. For months, I worked intensely to complete it in time. Frames of Reference became a deeply personal self-portrait told as a visual fairy tale—a journey through identity, migration, motherhood, belonging and transformation.
I was beyond elated when I learned that it had been selected for the 2024 Venice Biennale, where I exhibited as a guest artist within the Cameroon Pavilion. Through intricate symbolism, layered frames and contrasts between light and darkness, my personal story became part of a much wider conversation about what it means to be—and to feel like—a foreigner.
ABOUT THE ART
Frames of Reference
Frames of Reference is my life told as a visual fairy tale, a self-portrait not of how I look, but of the experiences that have made me who I am.
(2024)
Mixed Media, Ink and Gouache on Paper
85 cm X 77cm
I chose to tell this story without colour, allowing the stark contrast of black, white and varying shades of grey to take centre stage.
Light and darkness are fundamental to the work because they are fundamental to life. I painted the outermost frame with a very special, exceptionally light-absorbing Japanese black paint, creating an almost velvety darkness around the portrait. Rather than obscuring the image, that darkness makes every lighter shade within it more visible. For me, this became a metaphor for my own experience: sometimes it is only in contrast with the darkness that we learn to recognise our light.
Each frame holds moments both significant and seemingly small, forming a trail through childhood, adulthood, motherhood and artistic identity. Viewed individually, they can appear fragmented. Seen together, they become a protagonist's journey.
The story begins in the upper left corner of the outer frame and unfolds through a spiralling sequence of images. Childhood and a difficult family life give way to my decision to leave everything and everyone familiar behind and move alone to Germany, a country where I did not yet speak the language.
Frames of Reference is the story of a sojourner, the unfolding of the trials and tribulations of leaving home and my encounters with monsters of grief, loss and past trauma. It is a quest for peace, for love, for belonging and a home to finally call my own.
I have lived away from the place I came from for so long that it no longer feels like home to me. At the same time, the countries I have chosen as home will always contain some element of foreignness. Somewhere along the way, I had to come to terms with the idea that perhaps I am, in some sense, a foreigner everywhere.
This is what connected the work so deeply for me to the theme of the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. The painting is about migration not only between countries, but between languages, families, identities and different versions of oneself. It asks what happens to our idea of home when we have spent a lifetime leaving, arriving and beginning again.
Although the story is deeply personal, I hope it invites the viewer to look at their own life from a distance. What can feel chaotic while we are living it may, with time and perspective, reveal connections we could not see before.
At the centre is the person those experiences created.
The shadows remain part of the picture. They are also what allow the light to emerge.
