Georges Adéagbo

Georges Adéagbo was born in 1942 in Cotonou, Benin, and has lived and worked in that city for most of his adult life. His practice consists entirely of elaborate installations made from found objects: books, newspapers, posters, photographs, figurines, printed fabrics, postcards, and handwritten texts sourced from flea markets, bookshops, and his immediate environment. These accumulations are arranged in vast floor-based layouts that connect history, mythology, religion, personal narrative, and global politics in configurations that resist simple synthesis.

Adéagbo's installations function through the logic of unexpected juxtaposition and relational assembly that diverges sharply from the ordered archive of institutional modernity. A nineteenth-century European encyclopedia placed beside a Beninese newspaper, a Catholic crucifix adjacent to a Yoruba divination board, a political pamphlet alongside a fashion magazine: these pairings generate meanings that exceed any of the individual elements. The resulting works operate as both material documents of a life spent in attentive observation of the world and as speculative philosophical propositions about the relationships between cultures, histories, and belief systems.

Adéagbo has participated in the Venice Biennale, Documenta, and exhibitions at major institutions in Europe and North America, including a significant show at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington. He received the Prince Claus Award from the Netherlands and the Special Prize of the jury at the Venice Biennale in 1999. He is represented by Galerie Barbara Wien in Berlin, Lumen Travo in Amsterdam, and Galerie Mennour in Paris.