Seyni Awa Camara [ 1-54 African Art Fair ]

The Gallery of Everything, in collaboration with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, presents a memorial exhibition dedicated to Seyni Awa Camara (1945–2026), bringing together an assembly of more than 15 terracotta sculptures spanning different periods and scales of the Senegalese artist’s practice including some of the last works she produced.

The presentation traces Camara’s international trajectory back to works dating from the period of her first major European exhibition, the landmark Les Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidou in 1989, through to later works in a practice that continued for more than three decades. Among them are historic monumental sculptures standing over two metres high, alongside more intimate works that reveal the remarkable range of a sculptural language developed almost entirely from the artist’s home and courtyard in Bignona, Senegal.

Working and firing each sculpture by hand, Camara created an extraordinary population of maternal figures, hybrid beings, animals and ancestral spirits. Rooted in Diola traditions yet unmistakably her own, these works draw together lived experience, memory and dream, with recurring ideas of fertility, transformation and protection.

Camara inherited a centuries-old pottery tradition from the women of Basse-Casamance. From the age of six, she learned to work with clay alongside her mother, who made functional objects for local markets. Following a difficult first marriage, during which she stopped making sculpture, Camara returned to clay, moving beyond utilitarian forms to develop an extraordinary personal language shaped by lived experience, memory and an expansive dream world.

Motherhood became one of the defining subjects of Camara's work. Throughout her life, she continued to model and fire her sculptures by hand in the courtyard of her home in Bignona, conjuring a visionary universe of hybrid beings, animals, maternal figures and ancestral spirits. Rooted in Diola traditions yet contemporary in form, these densely populated terracottas explore fertility, transformation and protection, collapsing the boundaries between human, animal and spiritual worlds.

Her work is currently included in Koyo Kouoh's In Minor Keys at the 61st Venice Biennale, with the late curator quoted as saying: "I would like to have a forest of works by Seyni Awa Camara."