B-Side: Touki by Omar Victor Diop x Bernardaud

Bernardaud and Omar Victor Diop have collaborated to create Touki, a porcelain sculpture manufactured in its Limoges workshops, in a limited edition of 199.

"Touki’s face is that of the youth living on the margins of today’s world—the ones we only notice when they try to break free from their condition of being forgotten, neglected. His cap is his makeshift crown, a witness to his odyssey, so rarely told, so rarely celebrated, and at times even perceived as a nuisance.

The sun that Touki wears on his forehead is the sun of the Egyptians during Akhenaten’s time—the god Ra. It is the harsh sun of millet and peanut fields in the Sahel countryside, the relentless sun that beats down on the perilous paths of exile, taken by thousands of young men and women from Africa, the Americas, or Arabia—those who decide to leave so they are no longer victims of their condition, of climate, tyranny, oppression, or, worse still, of our indifference.

Human beings are on this earth to roam it, discover it, confront it, marvel at it. This is how the world was populated. Every native of a land owes it to an ancestor who came before them—who once, through a joyful or terrifying odyssey, set foot there."

Omar Victor Diop

*Touki: from the Wolof tukki (journey, exile)

B-Side is a project located in the window of the rue de Crussol. On the edge of our programme, the gallery invites an artist with a remarkable body of work to create a dialogue with our current exhibition.