The Senegalese-Mauritanian artist and librarian Hamedine Kane is capturing the slightest manifestation of life, affirmation and hope wherever he goes. In this series he photographed the inside composition of an empty, trashed, plastic container which has traveled from China, via Europe, to Africa, perhaps via the port of Hamburg. Its belly reflects the permanent circulation of matter and ideas as well as the energies of the “chaos-monde” a turbulent global entanglement of our planetary existence.

Kane’s sensitivity to look for fragility in what is disposedor rejected is inspired by Édouard Glissant writing onelements – fire, water, wind, earth – not as fixed symbols but as forces of relation and transformation, as metaphors for the dynamic, unpredictable processes through which cultures, histories, and identities interact. Glissant’s concept of the “right to opacity” is based on an idea that cultures do not need to be fully transparent to one another. Kane’s lightboxes both illuminate and obscure: they produce luminosity but also remain visually ungraspable. They want us to stay vigilant in our pursuit of new worlds coming out of the rupture of the old ones

Hamedine Kane, born in 1983 in Nouakchott, lives between Dakar and Brussels.

Presented in collaboration with M.Bassy and Kleist-Museum-Foundation.