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Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

Born, 1921 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

From the archived Documenta 11 website : www.documenta12.de//archiv/d11/data/english/index.html

“Lives in Abidjan, Càpe d’Ivoire. Since the 1940s, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré has been realizing his idea of the world as a large text connecting everything. His series of pictures consist of countless small, simple drawings, made with ball point and felt pen, ink, and pencil on small pieces of cardboard and one could say that his work consists of reading the world as a text, deciphering it, and rewriting it in increasingly large, ever more comprehensive cycles and series; tattoos, fossil markings, meteorological phenomena, modern posters, ethnological research, and folk legends are flexibly connected. In the 1950s, Bruly Bouabré realized that African self-understanding needed its own writing, different from that of the colonial powers. He then developed a method for writing the alphabet of his native tongue, Bété, which he continued to explain and subtly diversify in new graphic series (Alphabet Bété, 1980/1991-92). Documenta 11 displays three of his series, showing how his broad curiosity reinterprets objects so that they become part of an endlessly expanding visual language that renews our chances of being able to read the world.”