LILLE.- The contemporary artist of Cameroonian origin Pascale Marthine Tayou has been invited by lille3000 to present a monumental exhibition. Tayou belongs to the generation of African artists who are redefining postcolonial culture and combining the experiences of their origins with those of Europe where they now live. Exploring relations between money, power and art, the installations, sculptures and drawings of Pascale Marthine Tayou form a body of work and are to be experienced rather than explained. The artist speaks of his productions as collective works, an attitude honoring a sum of everyday moments, encounters and chance. For Lille, the artist has devised the exhibition Traffic Jam as an immense junction caught in a traffic jam, everyone seeking a way to get through the overcrowded stalls, fragile sculptures, and animated scaffolding.

The installation Human Being@work, a piece brimming with vitality, sensitive and moving, acclaimed by the critics during the last Venice Biennale, will be at the heart of the exhibition. It will be further enhanced with new productions – some of which are based on audience participation – and historical installations, recreating the artist’s unique world.“Lille will be a zone of experimentations at the heart of the confusion offered up by the History and Culture of Mankind. The Saint Sauveur station will be the operating theatre where the game of chance will go hand in hand with visual pleasures and fusions of forms.” (Pascale Marthine Tayou, August 2009)