MODOU DIENG YACINE

I Will Go Where Your Music Takes Me. Dakar, City of Migrations.

August 23 - September 27, 2025.

JOIN US FOR THE OPENING ON SATURDAY AUGUST 23 AT 14:00 - 16:00

See List of works here!

In SPECTA we are happy to present the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Senegalese/US artist Modou Dieng Yacine. The exhibition I Will Go Where Your Music Takes Me. Dakar, City of Migrations is a vibrant installation of colors, video and energetic paintings, forming a visual and fictional tale of Dakar, the West African city where migration breathes through every street, movement hums in every sound beat, and stories are painted on the walls in cobalt and fire.

Exhibition Text by Larry Ossei Mensah:

“I Will Go Where Your Music Takes Me. Dakar, City of Migrations. The full title of Modou Dieng Yacine's exhibition at Galerie Specta reads like a call-and-response - an invocation that grounds itself in place while celebrating movement. This poetic refrain transforms the gallery into a vibrant constellation of artworks that explore motion and memory, with Dakar serving as both subject and lens.

Both Dakar and Copenhagen are historic ports - sites shaped by migration and exchange. Visiting Copenhagen in May 2025, I watched the light dance across the pastel facades of Nyhavn - that "new harbor" - and found myself thinking of another port city thousands of miles away. Having walked Dakar's streets many times, I recognize how these two maritime cities, separated by oceans yet connected by the tidal forces of history, form the conceptual archipelago through which Yacine's work navigates. I Will Go Where Your Music Takes Me. Dakar, City of Migrations, highlights these spaces of arrival and departure, where cultures intersect and evolve through living testimonies carried across time.

Yacine's process mirrors migration itself - a dynamic act of layering, translation, and transformation. Working over archival photographs and historical references with acrylic paint and oil stick, he doesn't simply alter images but reactivates them. Each stroke becomes a crossing; each work functions as a palimpsest where colonial pasts, postcolonial presents, and speculative futures coexist on a single plane.

In Pink Tree Sunset (2025), vibrant yellow mark-making contends with the colonial architecture, while a palm tree rendered in explosive pinks and blues becomes a symbol of resilience. Almadies (2025) features a modernist housing block that could exist in Dakar's periphery or Copenhagen's social housing projects; its yellows on the facade of the building echo both the tropical sun and Scandinavian pastels - a palette that itself traveled through colonial trade routes.

Yacine charts the movement of people, materials, and ideas across geographies through what he calls a "visual score." Walking through Dakar's Plateau district - where colonial facades stand beside contemporary structures in ochre, terracotta, azure, and lime - I've come to recognize the visual vocabulary Yacine translates onto his artworks. Similarly, Copenhagen's chromatic symphony, from the rainbow row houses of Nyhavn to boldly painted modernist blocks, speaks to a shared language of urban joy. Both cities understand that color is not mere ornament - it's a claim to space, a signal of vitality, and an assertion of identity amidst layered histories.

His faceless figures embody migration not as a crisis but as a celebration. In Dakar - as in cities across Africa and the Global South - the migrant is not erased but exalted, their journeys heroic acts of transformation. In Man on Fire (2025), energetic brushstrokes engulf an anonymous avatar, evoking flame and raw motion - migration as alchemical burning, a crucible of reinvention. These universal figures pursue beauty, wealth, freedom, and self-definition as acts of resistance to imposed borders.

Yacine's street-level perspective grounds these expansive themes in intimate encounters. Gare de Dakar (2025) transforms a vintage photograph of the city's train station into a meditation on infrastructure as both conduit and rupture, with cascading white brushstrokes suggesting the emotional weight of departure and return. His engagement with the logic of signage, pedestrian flow, and architectural poetry reveals that migration also happens in the micro-movements of city living - gestures repeated across thresholds and intersections in both Dakar and Copenhagen.

Working within and against inherited visual systems, Yacine constructs what might be called "postcolonial abstraction," acknowledging historical violence while asserting new possibilities for image-making and meaning. Presented during Copenhagen's Chart Art Fair, the exhibition brings Dakar's visual language into dialogue with Northern European audiences, where Mediterranean pastels meet Scandinavian light and Wolof rhythms collide with Danish design.

I Will Go Where Your Music Takes Me. Dakar, City of Migrations, resonates as both memory and manifesto. It recognizes colonial legacies while honoring the joy, imagination, and resilience that emerge in their wake. In Yacine's vision, migration becomes a movement toward new ways of seeing and being - a polyphonic music where Dakar's streets mingle with Copenhagen's harbor winds, voices layered across languages and time, harmonizing toward a future not yet fully known.”

 ***

Modou Dieng Yacine (SN/US) was educated at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Dakar, Senegal, and the San Francisco Arts Institute in California. Yacine has exhibited extensively across the US and Europe as well as repeatedly at the Dakar Biennale. He was professor and director of the Department of Arts and Painting for 10 years at the Pacific Northwestern College of Art in Portland, Oregon. Modou Dieng Yacine is represented in numerous collections, among them are the collections of the Studio Museum in New York, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, The New Carlsberg Foundation, Gervanne and Mathias Lerind Collection and Fondation Gandur. He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is also co-founder of and curator for Blackpuffin.

Larry Ossei-Mensah is a Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic. Ossei-Mensah has curated exhibitions all over the world, and as co-founder of the nonprofit ARTNOIR, he pioneers racial equity in the art world, amplifying the voices of creatives, curators, and communities of color.