Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
Inside a dim Saint-Louis bar, a young woman and a young man lean toward each other across the corner of a small table. She wears a white lace dress with floral trim and a starfish earring; a bag strap crosses her shoulder. He wears a patterned short-sleeved shirt and a small round cap, and his hand rests along her forearm as hers touches her own chin. Both are smiling, close, the smile of a conversation that has just tipped from talk into something warmer. This is the studium, courtship in a nightclub, legible and charming.
But the room is dense with signs that pull the image out of the present. Behind the bar a woman in a ruffled blouse leans in mid-motion; at the right a saxophonist perches, horn raised, caught in performance; two large painted faces watch from the wall, and a chalkboard reads the name Sidibe. The reference is unmistakable, and it is the punctum here, the picture quoting Malick Sidibe’s Bamako of the 1960s, its youth, its music, its Saturday-night joy, so that Idun-Tawiah’s contemporary lovers are lit from within by a remembered golden age of West African photography.
This layering is the intelligence of the work. The image is not a copy but an homage that knows itself as such, staging the vintage tenderness of the Memories Between Earth And Sky series while naming its own lineage on the wall. Have I Ever Sold You A Dream, the title asks, and the picture answers by admitting it is a dream, a beautifully constructed one. Idun-Tawiah keeps the two faces almost touching in the warm dark, and lets the whole apparatus of reference fall away before the simple, persuasive fact of two people delighted to be near each other.