We live with images, and we understand the world in images.
Hans Belting
Images carry memories within them. They preserve traces of places, people, and histories, and they change when they encounter other images. Yannick Ackah’s painting occupies this field of tension. His works form pictorial spaces in which different times, materials, and visual experiences converge: figures encounter masks, drawings meet newspaper, paint meets fabric, and personal memories encounter images drawn from a collective memory.
The solo exhibition À la rencontre des images at the Institut français Hamburg brings together works from different phases of his practice and directs attention to a form of painting in which visible reality and experiences that resist immediate comprehension become intertwined. Ackah combines painting and collage in multilayered compositions in which figuration and abstraction merge. Fragments are removed from their original contexts, superimposed, and reassembled. The image thus becomes not a self-contained object, but an open process in which meaning is continually renewed.
The human figure and the mask play a central role. Faces appear as bearers of presence while also retaining an enigmatic quality. The mask refers to cultural visual traditions, yet in Ackah’s work it is never merely a quotation. It becomes an open form situated between concealment and revelation, individual appearance and cultural memory. Bodies, postures, and gazes give experiences visible form without defining them conclusively.
In this context, Ackah’s painting can be read through Hans Belting’s understanding of the image as a relationship between image, body, and medium. An image arises not only through what it represents, but also through its material form and the embodied experience of viewing. In Ackah’s works, this connection becomes immediately perceptible: newspaper, fabric, photographic fragments, and layers of paint inscribe traces of reality into the pictorial surface. The surface becomes both a repository and a site of transformation.
Ackah’s visual language moves between different cultural and visual worlds. West African visual traditions encounter European modernism, urban visual cultures, and the imagery of a globalised present. Artistic references are not simply adopted, but shifted, fragmented, and transferred into new contexts. What matters is less the origin of an individual motif than its movement: How do images travel? What happens when they leave their original context? And what new meanings emerge through their encounters?
Identity, too, appears in Ackah’s painting not as something fixed, but as something in motion, shaped by memory, origin, experience, and the gaze of others. His images connect the personal with the collective and the past with the present without dissolving the distinctions between them. The exhibition therefore does not follow an exclusively chronological order. Earlier and more recent works enter into dialogue, revealing recurring motifs as well as shifts in material, form, and expression. Across several years, a practice emerges that engages with fragments, superimpositions, and open pictorial spaces with increasing freedom.
À la rencontre des images understands the image as a site where the visible and the invisible encounter one another. Ackah’s painting gives memories, experiences, and cultural images a physical presence without fixing their meaning conclusively. Its openness lies precisely in the fact that every image carries further images within it, and that every act of looking creates new relationships between them.
