Pascale Marthine Tayou, Beautiful

Exhibition Website

Oct 29 2017 - May 20 2018

Born in Cameroon and based in Ghent, Pascale Marthine Tayou will bring his itinerant practice to Miami Beach for his exhibition, Beautiful, creating an organic and collaboratively formed presentation of work made in the last decade. Tayou, whose practice spans media and subject matter, is an alchemist of sorts. His work fluidly transforms and recasts the viewer’s understanding of materials, objects, and narratives. Tayou’s constructions not only mediate between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced with the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. Beautiful includes an intervention with the museum’s permanent collection where Tayou presents his work alongside his own selection of objects from The Bass’ founding collection.

The dialogue between contemporary artworks and objects from the past speak to his overall practice and material considerations for incorporating objects encountered by chance or from his immediate surroundings into the installation. Tayou’s concern for the decolonization of histories and territories aligns with the international and transient nature of Miami Beach and the impact tourism continues to have in shaping the city. Included in his exhibition, a newly commissioned, site-specific work called Welcome Wall, composed of animated LED signs, reading “welcome” in over 70 languages, broadcasts a message of profound inclusion from the lobby of the museum.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Various Media
  • Africa
  • Contemporary
  • Indigenous
  • Pascale Marthine Tayou

Exhibition Venues & Dates