Colonie de foulards

Pascale Marthine Tayou's installation Colonie de foulards (“Colony of Scarves”) features an assemblage of flags and coloured scarves hanging from a long, serpentine metal support. Viewers, unable to take in the entire work with a single gaze, are invited to get lost in the dead ends of a silky, colourful maze.

This 2004 work is part of the artist's reflection on identity in a postcolonial context. Within the same continuum of colours, it mixes and blends national identities, represented by flags, and scarves, devoid of meaning, metaphorically referring to Africa’s former colonisers.

The installation Colonie de foulards, which is in the Pinault Collection, was presented during the 2009 exhibition "Un certain état du monde ?" (“A Certain State of the World?”) at the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow.