Design En Afrique: S’Asseoir, se Coucher et Rêver at Musée Dapper

The Musée Dapper has produced one of the rentrée’s big surprises: the discovery of contemporary African design. Design En Afrique: S’Asseoir, se Coucher et Rêver (Design in Africa: Sit, Lie Down and Dream) presents more than 100 contemporary works that often have a twist: The Gabonais duo Christian Ndong Menzamet and Antonio Pépin offers a “ngil” bookcase and built-in stool of dyed okoumé and cherry wood with the large blank eyes of a mask and imposing wood horns on top. Ivory Coast designer Vincent Niamien’s sculptural wood and metal chair is called Sie (parent) in tribute to his father, a mask sculptor, and his mother, a ceramist.

Iviart Izamba, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, designed his Mobutu armchair, made of recuperated leopard skins and metal, as a sharp satire of the tyrannical dictator’s habitual leopard-skin hat. New York-based Burkina Faso native, sculptor and designer Alassane Drabo created a metal and wood chest of different shaped drawers that is a smoother echo of Droog designer Tejo Remy’s iconic 1991 bundle of disparate vintage drawers. Remy’s was a critique of consumerism; Drabo’s Cadre d’Union (Union Framework), in the shape of the African continent, is a furniture metaphor for the idea that “Africa must get itself together”.

35 bis rue Paul Valéry, Paris 16th. Oct. 10–July 14. www.dapper.fr

Originally published in the October 2012 issue of France Today