Interwoven Narratives
Open March 24th 2024 | Galerie Revel
Marking a significant milestone in Samuel Nnorom's artistic journey in France, Interwoven Narratives highlights the artist’s most recent creations until March 24th 2024. Deployed in the gallery’s spacious contemporary space, the exhibition unveils an array of never-before-seen pieces and invites exploration of the corpus through the lens of Edouard Glissant’s concept of the Tout-Monde (as the “Whole-World”). Theorized by the French poet, novelist and philosopher in 1997, the concept encapsulates the vision of a global and interconnected world, where cultures, identities and experiences converge to form a unified whole.
Born in 1990 in Abia State (Nigeria), Samuel Nnorom places sewing, cutting, and tying – skills inherited from his mother – Ankara fabric at the very center of his work. Deeply rooted in West African daily life, Ankara fabric is known for its nebulous origins in Africa, thus making it a medium of choice for the artist. Recovering pre-loved scraps from local second-hand stores, Nnorom harnesses the original vibrant palette and patterns of the fabric to create abstract pieces at the crossroads of sculpture and tapestry. His large-scale pieces, climbing the walls like flourishing vines, consist of hundreds of fabric-covered “bubbles”, symbolizing our individual identities and collectively forming what the artist metaphorically calls a “social fabric”. Appearing in an illusion of perpetual motion, Nnorom’s webs act as catalysts of pareidolias: viewers may discern landscapes, urban structures, organic cells, or endless mazes – in all cases, something interconnected. Above all, the artist creates pieces as magnifying mirrors of our contemporary issues, delving deeply into the politics of today’s globalized society.
Building upon Nnorom's idea of a "social fabric," Interwoven Narratives seeks to interlace the conceptual insights of the young Nigerian artist with the philosophical underpinnings of Edouard Glissant's Tout-Monde. Glissant’s ode to multiplicity, interdependence and co-existence is brilliantly embodied by Samuel Nnorom abstract sculptures: an ever-evolving network where languages, cultures, experiences, narratives, journeys, and encounters intricately entwine to shape a mesmerizing web of interconnected relations.
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ABOUT GALERIE REVEL
Founded in 2021, Galerie REVEL is a contemporary art gallery deeply committed to highlighting visual artists from geographies marginalized in Western artistic discourses. Advocating for an international selection, the gallery supports emerging and mid-career artists whose work resonates with contemporary concerns and initiates fruitful dialogues between the Global South and the West. These conversations, forged in the crucible of crucial issues of our time — identity, gender, ecology, decoloniality, postcolonial cultures, cultural appropriations, and migration — are all traces borne by each artist’s corpus.
As a space for heuristics and intellectual explorations, where artists are free to challenge the thresholds and limits of their practice, Galerie REVEL embraces experimentation with innovative techniques and the exploration of alternative mediums. It also actively contributes to the pluralization of art narratives, privileging narratives rooted in contemporaneity and written from marginalized voices, particularly those that are queer, racialized, and situated in the so-called peripheries — notably South America and Africa, but not limited to.
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