Camerounian Artist Goddy Leye holds first solo exhibition in Berlin

Goddy Leye
'The Beautiful Beast'
New Video Installation Works
15th May - 20th June 2009

News Release by Galerie Peter Herrmann

As a video artist Goddy Leye appropriates western politics-, art- as well as music-history and adjusts stereotypes to a new meaning. For his installation work The Beautiful Beast, which will be shown in the upper gallery rooms, he projects a film onto a wooden box filled with sesame seeds. To the soundtrack of a screaming crowd, taken out of the movie M. by Fritz Lang (1931), one can see the artist performing something like a modern dance. Goddy Leye combines all this to a new visual und auditory story: sesame seeds, that look like pixel underneath the video, the sound of a very political classical movie, mixed with a dancing artist from Cameroon, trying to get himself out of his own system. How political, socio-critical or how much critical appraisal is in this work, you can see in the Galerie Peter Herrmann from May 14 – June 20, 2009.

We invite everybody to the opening on Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 8 pm. The artist created the installations for the gallery and will be present for the opening. Through a scholarship of DAAD he is working in Berlin for the next two months.

For the second installation he is going to build a box of mirrored glass, which includes a monitor and a traditional african figure. The viewer can both just see through a little whole or with the right light through the mirrored glass.

For him it is not the first exhibition in Berlin. Already in 2006 he presented a video work for a project called "Gleichzeitig in Afrika..." on a Berlin shop window in Deutschlandhaus. In this work he satirises the song in his video of the same name We are the World.

Also Goddy Leye's work The B-Wall, which he presented 1998 on the 7. Triennale der Kleinplastik includes German/ Berlin history. In Stuttgart he depicted on a TV screen the world famous Berlin wall jumper from 1961 and wrapped barbed wire around the whole device. To see this thousandfold widespreaded image of German history in the work of a Camaroonian artist, opened for new interpretation and caused numerous debates.

Goddy Leye achieved with his video installations international presence during the last years. Only in Germany he was represented in the ZKM Karlsruhe (1997); in the 7. Triennale der Kleinplastik/ Stuttgart (1998); in the ifa-Galerie/ Bonn, Stuttgart, Berlin (2000); in Afrika Remix/ Düsseldorf (2004) and in Gleichzeitig in Afrika/ Berlin (2006). The Galerie Peter Herrmann now presents his first solo show in Germany.

Goddy Leye was born in 1965 in Cameroon, he lives and works in Douala/ Cameroon. His project ArtBakery in Douala is known as an important hub for curators, artists and other intellectuals.