Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix presents The Sacred Fire Beneath Our Feet, Anthony Ngoya’s second solo exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Ngoya continues to work across a range of media to create installations that are distinctly his own. In this exhibition, Ngoya recreates his personal reading of the soil of his ancestors and his ongoing quest to explore his identity through family history, which unfold through glass and metal sculptures, ceramic sculptures with integrated sound, paintings, fabric works printed with images from his family archive, and video works.
The exhibition grew out of the artist’s return to his ancestral homeland, the Republic of the Congo, after twenty years away. Born and raised in France, Ngoya traces a journey across two distinct landscapes: the inland, urban world of his father’s family and the coastal shores of his mother’s lineage. Drawing on personal archives and regional history, the exhibition explores where colonial resource flows and intimate family histories overlap, moving from the landscape directly to the body and to memory.