“Amazon” – Sculpture, beads, wax, resin, traditional fabrics, leather, Suzuki Ax 100 motorbike, plants /
180 x 175 x 60 cm / Courtesy of the artist

(Beya Gille Gacha | Sacatar Fellow 2024 | Visual Arts | France)

Beya reinvents the traditional Bamileke beading technique in her series “When God is a Woman”, celebrating contemporary women artists. “Amazone”(Amazon) is a sculpture in this series, inspired by the musician and poet Daba Makourejah. It represents a motorcyclist who is symbolic of our race towards technological destruction. At a standstill, she challenges us with her gaze, holding a germinating plant shoot in her hand, signifying renewal in the face of collapse. “Amazon” thus embodies resilience and the preparation of a new future.

A Franco-Cameroonian artist, Beya initially distinguished herself by her anthropomorphic sculptures whose skin is made of seed beads, a personal reinvention of the traditional Bamiléké (Cameroon) beading technique. For her, her sculptures are magical doubles of their models, somewhere between art object, sacred fetish and transitional object. Constantly exploring, her artistic practice continually evolves in a variety of media, as illustrated by the canvases on which she uses medicinal plant mixtures as pigments. The artist also creates experimental installations and videos, which she conceives as initiatory visual tales or metaphors for metaphysical experiences. Her approach is a play on light and shadow, and her work is a bridge between different sensibilities (intellectual, intimate, societal, philosophical, political, spiritual).