In his installation in the MAK Gallery, Georges Adéagbo (born 1942 in Cotonou, Republic of Benin) opens up a paradoxical field of fictions which, set in a colonial and post-colonial discourse, address reciprocal phantasms of otherness. His choice of subject matter is as intricate as his enactment which puts the selected objects in a temporary, always revocable order, setting up networks of meaning that are mutually counteractive and building up expectations which are then thwarted or diverted by the artist.

Georges Adéagbo is a boundary crosser, who works with colonized objects, setting them in new contexts with existing museum objects that are connoted as corresponding to Western ideas of art and Western values. The identity of the “colonial” objects is a hybrid one, a mix of adaptation and persistence, of continuity and break, a construction of fragments. Georges Adéagbo characteristically takes to the method of assemblage, the compilation of different carriers of information—books, handwritten notes, photos, textiles, cult objects, etc.—which he uses to build new narrative spaces. If the artists incorporates sculptures in his work which, from a Eurocentric perspective, are labeled as “tribal art” or “primitive art”, it is an act of reappropriation or repossession of previously “colonized” objects. The artist makes reference to the history of appropriation and reception of African and Oceanian art by artists such as

In his installation created especially for the MAK Gallery and addressing the subject of colonization and of the colonized the artist also includes objects from the museum holdings, questioning the usual selecting criteria that make an object seem “worth exhibiting” and “presentable”.

Moreover, Georges Adéagbo reaches out beyond the gallery space in that he directly intervenes in the MAK Permanent Collection, probing for colonialist implications. Thus, in the exhibition rooms of the Permanent Collection Baroque Rococo Classicism, Orient, and 20th/21st Century Architecture, he responds to specific objects from the collection which he juxtaposes and even undermines with his own art objects, thus making them part of his installation and continually raising the question of the significance of representation and the claim to power.

Georges Adéagbo took part in the 48th Biennale di Venezia in 1999 where was awarded the “Premio della giuria” for his work; 2002 he was a participant of the documenta 11 (under the curatorship of Okwui Enwezor). Adéagbo was the first contemporary artist ever to make an intervention in the premises of the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. For 2009, he has again been invited to the 53rd Biennale di Venezia.