Sada Tangara

Born in 1984 in Kaolac (Senegal), he lives in Dakar.

As a street child of Dakar, at the age of 13 Sada Tangara embarked on his unique photographic series, The Big Sleep . The story started with an operation to assist homeless children organized by the Man-Keen-Ki House and art school, founded in Dakar by Oumar Sall and Jean-Michel Bruyère. Sada Tangara's work was exhibited along with other young boarders who had been given disposable cameras; he showed an initial version of this series of pictures which he continued, in a more complex, the following year. He was awarded the Gilles Dusein prize in 2003. 

How did you discover Sada Tangara's work?

Christian Bernard: Frédéric Roux showed me these pictures. I think it's the only series of photos we have by him, and it forms a very homogeneous whole. As if he were a photographer by birth, although he'd never actually held a camera in his hands, Sada Tangara immediately shows a sense of frame and light which is totally arresting. He photographs his brothers, those young people among whom he used to live, at night, when they are sleeping. Otherwise put, at the moment of their greatest vulnerability. These beings who only survive by turning themselves into things, in particular through prostitution, are captured here like things, not to say piles of things. Without any pictorial pathos: they are hard, aching bodies, in the torpor of exhaustion.

How does this series fit into your le Printemps de septembre programme?

It finds its coherence in a kind of triangle which these images form with those of Hannah Villiger and Maud Fässler. Something akin to a praxis of the image as salvation before death. There are three ways of looking at the subject-less body: the children of Dakar asleep and almost turned into something mineral by Sada Tangara, the demystified autopsies of the young Swiss photographer Maud Fässler, the de-eroticized, de-subjectivized auto-photographs in which Hannah Villiger uses her own body as the object and instrument of her sculpture, ending up with the male gaze cast over the female body in art history. Three instances where bodies come within the scope of repulsion and de-fascination, and dodge commodification, be it real or symbolic.