“On the Thread” which launched on Thursday (Jan. 12) in Dakar, is an exhibition celebrating the diversity of embroidery and weaving.
For anyone who is yet to know the luxury brand – Chanel is a French luxury fashion house founded in 1910 by Coco Chanel in Paris. Chanel specializes in women’s ready-to-wear, luxury goods, and accessories and licenses its name and branding to Luxottica for eyewear. Chanel is well known for its No. 5 perfume and “Chanel Suit” and the brand is credited for revolutionizing haute couture and ready-to-wear by replacing structured, corseted silhouettes with more functional garments that women still found flattering.
The opening of la Galerie du 19M Dakar will celebrate the richness of craftsmanship. Entitled” Sur le fil” (On the thread in French), the programme showcases a beautiful story of embroidery and weaving crafts combined with other artistic disciplines like painting, photography and installations. The main goal is to highlight the creative wealth of Senegal and the humanistic values of its arts and crafts.
“We wanted to go a little further, break out of the mould of the Maison Chanel, and open this exhibition creativity,” Bruno Pavlovsky, the chairman of Chanel SAS and Chairman of 19M space said. “This dialogue brings in artists from all walks of life and especially some based here in Dakar. We wanted to shed light on these ancestral crafts, around the hand, around weaving and embroidery.”
During the exhibition, visitors will discover numerous contemporary artists working with textiles, some of which are in collaboration with le19 M’s Maisons d’art. This exhibition will be presented in parallel with heritage pieces from the Musée Théodore-Monod d’Art Africain collections.
Several artists will be creating and displaying their work in front of the audience in live conditions. This will result in public workshops run by visiting artists. One of the artists is Alassane Koné, a young Malian artist whose works are showcased in the exhibition. This needle painter is one of the artists in their twenties who are exhibited in one of the two buildings of the Théodore-Monod Museum in Dakar.
“My inspiration comes from my environment,” the artist said. Whenever I see someone doing something in the street, I take a picture of them and then I come back to the studio and then I reproduce it on my board to draw. There are bonds that unite us, people, like threads. For me to work on my painting, I pull links between threads too because I mix colours.”
The thematic tour maps certain Senegalese skills, including a section on indigo dye, and a focus on Casamance, a region in Senegal’s south which is the cradle of the mandjak woven loincloth tradition.
One of West Africa’s premier research institutions, the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (IFAN), will host a series of workshops, discussions and debates on crafts throughout the exhibition. This institution was first created by the French Government in 1938. Established in Dakar, Senegal, the organization was originally called the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire. Designed on behalf of French colonial administrators, the IFAN was to be a cultural and scientific institute that focused on the expansion of knowledge pertaining to the historical, linguistic, and sociological aspects of French colonial populations in West Africa.
