Le souvenir d'un présent invisible (Genève d'hier, Genève d'aujourd'hui)

On a table known as a “bouillotte,” used for games during the reign of Louis XVI, rests an assemblage emblematic of George Adéagbo's artistic vocabulary. 

The Beninese tobacco pot, carved from thick sacred wood and decorated with a sleeping woman, is in dialogue with a small brass crown. In the Yoruba societies of West Africa, the ancient mastery of metallurgy, attested as early as the 13th century, was closely linked to royalty, the sacred, and ancestor worship. Metaphorically, this crown opens up a field of resonance around forms of power and sovereignty in West Africa.

Nearby, Constantin Brancusi's Sleeping Muse, inspired by African statuary and reproduced on the cover of the art magazine Die Weltkunst, is placed next to Raymond Cartier's Histoire mondiale de l'après-guerre (Postwar World History), an example of a European writing of world history.

The artist weaves tense links, made up of historical friction, between objects from his collections. Like silent witnesses, they inhabit this mysterious game board.

This work is part of the Pinault Collection and was presented for the first time at the "Corps et âmes" exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in 2025