An Afro-Asian staging of a masquerade
– a Japanese photographer adopted by the Dogon country before advancing, masked, throughout the history of art in Paris, Tokyo, and Venice.
– an Ivorian artist who, from Abidjan to Paris, draws a traditional history of a symbolic Africa with a strong spirit of ecumenism.

They have much in common: the delicate use of material, the everpresent history that is inherent to the mask, the technical mastery and finally, a universal aesthetic the viewer can identify with even before venturing into the underlying conceptual meaning.
Their work is not about theatrics, artifice or vanity and pretence, a protective screen, an isolating barrier. The two artists rather engage in a game of aesthetic hide and seek, and through their work around the mask, offer us a very personal and original vision of humanity and its many facets.

Yves Sabourin, who wrote the foreword to the exhibition catalogue, sums up the dialogue between the two artists:

“With Kimiko Yoshida, everything is precision and incarnation. With Ernest Dükü, everything is abstraction and immateriality. If everything seems to separate them, it’s only an impression. For both feel the irrational need to draw on culture and aesthetics, and in the end, in different ways, happily lend a cosmic dimension to their work. For them, accumulation makes things legible: it’s a statement. MasKarades offers us the opportunity to contemplate two contemporary artistic expressions with unique styles, in which the spirit of textiles, even when only hinted at, serves as a cultural and artistic bond.”