The first room of his Museum of Contemporary African Art, de Salle Esquisse or Draft Room was presented by Meschac Gaba in 1997 at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. In 2002 he showed the final room – the Humanist Space – at the Documenta XI in Kassel. His museum consists of twelf rooms in total, which have been on show at various institutes in different countries. In Museum De Paviljoens, all of the rooms come together for the first time in a total installation in which the boundaries between Museum De Paviljoens and the Museum of Contemporary African Art are blurred. However, this doesn’t mean that this conceptual Museum takes its definitive shape there. Following its presentation at Museum De Paviljoens, the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel will show a new version of the Museum of Contemporary African Art & More.
Since the time of his studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, this Benin artist resides and works in the Netherlands for a major part of the year and has left his mark on the Dutch art history. In 2003 he was one of five artists selected by curator Rein Wolfs, currently artistic director at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, to represent the Netherlands at the Venice Biennale in the exhibition We Are The World.
Following Yael Davids in 2003-2004, Job Koelewijn in 2004-2005 and Barbara Visser in 2006-2007, Meschac Gaba (Cotonou, Benin, 1961) is the fourth artist to take centre stage in a series of solo exhibitions at Museum De Paviljoens that spotlight artists working in the Netherlands who have made an important contribution to Dutch art history in the past 10 years.
Website Meschac Gaba