Modou Dieng Senegal, b. 1970
Modou Dieng Yacine is a Senegalese-American artist who employs painting, photography and collage to propose images rooted in intertextuality and intercultural exchange. He uses images and materials to express how forces such as migration and global cultural correspondences can lead to the multi-layered enrichment of contemporary culture.
Along with particular materials such as denim, burlap, cardboard and wood frames that reference his Senegalese background, Dieng Yacine employs compositional strategies and formal methods that reference a range of global aesthetic positions, from African art history, to Bauhaus philosophies, to contemporary Pop culture. The result is an expression of what Dieng Yacine calls "asymmetrical parallelism, a term coined by African poet and philosopher Léopold Sédar Senghor, defined as a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space.”
"What do you mean by integrity of difference?” Dieng Yacine asks. “You mean authenticity? What is authentic? The question really is: should we take authenticity as something that comes from modernity, from tradition or from contemporary life?"
Dieng Yacine earned his BFA in Painting from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Senegal, and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, CA. Recent residencies include Art OMI Residency, Ghent, NY; Crows Shadow Residency, Pendleton, OR; and Pulsar Residency, Antwerp, Belgium. Recent exhibitions include San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal; Art in Embassy, US Department of States, Dakar Embassy, Senegal; and Museum of African Diaspora Art, New York, NY, among many others.
