‘I often don’t know what I’m writing about. The writing comes before the thought,’ says French artist and performer Ndayé Kouagou. Watching the two video works in his forthcoming exhibition, ‘A Message for Everybody’ at Gathering in London, this quickly becomes clear.
They feature a number of meandering monologues, rife with diversions. Replacing his voice with a deadpan AI-sounding one, speaking the didactic language of the social media influencer, he follows his nose from one morsel of advice or anecdote to the next. Often, it’s difficult to work out what’s profound and what’s meaningless.
A to Z (2023), for example, is a work of absurd brilliance. It opens with a promise to navigate the viewer through the letters of the alphabet and ends, following four minutes of digression, by refusing to make good on that promise. ‘I’m not going to do all 25 letters of the alphabet,’ says Kouagou, having already disowned Z.
Such disorder doesn’t stop Kouagou from speaking with confidence, telling us that ‘listening to me is a good choice’. He speaks politely and firmly, like a fitness or fashion influencer who knows what’s best for us. ‘I love to take their way of talking, which is so sure, and be so uncertain about what I say. So full of doubt, so full of contradictions,’ he tells me.
The title of the show, ‘A Message for Everybody’, is one such contradiction. ‘I like this obsession in the Western world with the universal,’ Kouagou says. In his view, despite this obsession, any attempt we might make at articulating something universal will inevitably end up being ‘limited to our small world’.
In Here and Elsewhere (2024), a news reporter grasps at the universal by asking passers-by, ‘What do you think about what’s happening here and elsewhere?’ The ensuing segment degrades in coherence as it goes on. Instead of a salient answer, we receive comments that range from the disgruntled and confused to the decidedly indignant: ‘Fuck you and all the people watching your stupid stream,’ says one woman.
Kouagou is ever-present in his work, looking out at the viewer. The world that he’s building, full of the specific strain of incoherence encouraged by social media, is not a distant one; he’s a part of it. In fact, we all are – at least those of us who are partial to a spot of scrolling. These videos don’t take place in a fantasy world; this is reality. As the artist puts it, ‘I want people to understand that it’s about them and not anything else.’
‘Ndayé Kouagou: A Message for Everybody’ is at Gathering, London, 29 Nov–21 Dec 2024
