FIAF, The Permanent Mission of France to the United Nations, The Permanent Mission of Senegal to the United Nations and Galerie Templon present Clin d’oeil, an exhibition of one of Omar Ba’s most important historical works, at the United Nation’s Headquarters.
With this wall-sized painting, one of Omar Ba’s most important historical works – Clin d’œil à Cheikh Anta Diop-Un continent à la recherche de son histoire (2017) – the artist pays tribute to Senegalese historian and politician Cheikh Anta Diop. He references Diop’s thesis from the 1950s in which he affirms that the societies of Ancient Egypt were populated by Black Africans, as well as his ground-breaking book of The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. This volume, published in 1974, asserts the influence of ancient African civilizations on the rest of the world.
Presented in the heart of the United Nations headquarters, this exhibition highlights the cultural relations between France and Senegal, Francophonie as well as our shared heritage.
Omar Ba
Born in 1977 in Senegal, Omar Ba lives and works in Dakar and New York.
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His paintings, produced using a variety of techniques and materials, represent political and social motifs open to multiple interpretations. His artistic vocabulary raises historical and timeless questions while formulating a wholly contemporary artistic message. Omar Ba’s iconography features personal metaphors, ancestral references and hybrid figures. This combination of heterogeneous elements illustrates his desire to abolish boundaries and categories. His work, with its enigmatic nature and poetic intensity, rejects all forms of didactic narrative, seeking instead to express his subconscious and his symbolic interpretation of the real.
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