On The Wakaliga Roadside

We proudly invite you to visit two exhibitions jointly called Spiritualscapes that feature works by Hestia’s represented artist and first resident, Louis-Cyprien Rials. Spiritualscapes brings – On the Wakaliga Roadside at the Hestia Gallery and then Afrituals in collaboration with the Museum of African Art.

The exhibition On the Wakaliga Roadside (Au bord de la route de Wakaliga) was originally set up in 2019 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, for which the artist won the prestigious SAM Art Prize. The basis of the exhibition is a film adaptation of Rashōmon (1950) by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, which was performed in collaboration with Ramon Film Productions. Within the exhibition, the screening is accompanied by posters made by the artist and based on Japanese, German or even Swedish posters of the original version of the film, as well as fake weapons made as movie props, AK-47 rifles and a golden pistol. The exhibition creates many different points of view and can be interpreted in comparison with the cultural, social and temporal crossroads of the film Rashomon.

from the foreword by Adélaïde Blanc, curator of the exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo

Afrituals, an exhibition created in collaboration with the Museum of African Art, includes works from countries that the artist visited during his long travels on the African continent, primarily his stay on the Somali Peninsula in 2019. In the video work After Night (Après la Nuit), the artist embarks on a journey from Lake Natron in Tanzania to the Las Gel Caves in Somaliland, passing through the Niero Rocks in Uganda and ending his journey in the Danakil Depression, one of the lowest and warmest regions on the planet. Aware of what was an integral part of these landscapes and their forgotten painters-inhabitants and supported by the sound recording of Romain Poirier, Cyprien evokes themes of war, predatory sentiment and ritual, making other presented works recognized as a possibility of what is happening in the landscape.