(Yaoundé, Cameroon in 1967) Lives and works in Ghent, Belgium
Ever since the beginning of the 1990’s and his participation in Documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel and at the Venice Biennale (2005 and 2009) Pascale Marthine Tayou has been known to a broad international public. From the beginning of his artistic career he changed his name, taking a double name in the female form: Pascal(e) Marthin(e). His work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. It is always closely linked to the idea of travel and of coming into contact with what is other to self, and is so spontaneous that it almost seems casual. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou have a recurrent feature in common: they dwell upon an individual moving through the world and exploring the issue of the global village. He works on the identity-based contradictions created by globalization and plays on the relations he has with his own identity. His notebook is yet another comment on the individual versus the collective, on multiplicity of identities and finding ways of being together in these complex times.
