Ishola Akpo

The gallery Sabrina Amrani presents a new monographic exhibition by Ishola Akpo (Yopougon, Ivory Coast, 1983) under the title Kpodjito. This is the second solo exhibition at the gallery of the artist based in Cotonou (Benin). The title ‘Kpodjito’ is derived from a Fongbe word meaning ‘She who gave birth to the leopard.’ Ishola Akpo's practice has for many years been exposing issues related to the female figure.

The exhibition L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux at the Sabrina Amrani gallery in 2022 is the first time that objects/installations appear: "This exhibition explores the dowry, an ancestral and secular practice, implicit in many traditional and contemporary societies. The dowry is a symbolic gesture, sealing the union of spouses and their families. Inspired by my grandmother's experience, it was important for me to revisit this ceremony which is still very much alive in our society. [...] I therefore presented an installation made up of 80 metal enamel plates called Kpanou in the Fon language, these plates are encrusted with metal rings. This work gives substance to the 80 years during which my grandmother kept these objects. 

Sabrina Amrani is pleased to annouce Ishola Akpo’s participation in Rencontres de Bamako (Bamako Encounters), the Mali biennial dedicated to African photography and video, in the event’s thirteenth edition, taking place between October 20, 2022, and December 20, 2022. 

Exhibition "Benin Art of yesterday and today, from Restitution to Revelation: Royal Treasures and Contemporary Art of Benin" | The artists gives body and life to fantasies and legends by giving them a materiality and by engraving them in a fidelity. The representation of women, in their amplified attributions, is one of their lines of force. Under the tools of Ishola Akpo the ladies of power, holy messengers and goddesses. The place given to them by the artists is that of transmitters of memory and history.

“Reinvesting history is a way of taming it. Making it more personal, more poetic”, says Beninese artist Ishola Akpo. The photographer has chosen to pay tribute to African queens – figures History has forgotten. With Agbara Women and Traces d’une reine (Traces of a queen), he investigates a complex past where the notion of power is synonymous with resistance and fragility. 

‘Africa is no Island’ presents an ambitious survey of photography that draws on the work of 23 African, diasporic and non-African photographers. Curated by the collective Afrique in Visu (Lisbon- based Jeanne Mercier and Baptiste de Ville d’Avray, here collaborating with curator Madeleine de Colnet), ‘Africa is no Island’ profitably brings together work intellectually rooted in journalistic, historical and anthropological enquiry. 

The LagosPhoto Festival in Nigeria convened renowned photographers from around the world with some connection to Africa to take on the continent's identity. Ishola Akpo took the best images of her grandmother in a series that attempted to show the relevance of the theme of dowry and arranged marriages in African culture.