"What an image depicts can never be separated, in Yannick Ackah’s work, from what it carries within itself. Memories, cultural traditions, and traces of social reality converge in his paintings to form pictorial spaces in which different times and experiences become present simultaneously. Under the title À la rencontre des images, his solo exhibition at the Institut français Hamburg brings works from different periods of his practice into dialogue with one another.
Human figures and mask-like faces emerge from ornamental grounds, while painting and drawing intersect with newspaper, fabric, and photographic fragments. The mask becomes a mediator between visibility and concealment, individual experience and cultural memory. Drawing on Hans Belting’s understanding of the image as an interplay of image, body, and medium, Ackah’s painting unfolds as a site of continual encounters: images contain other images within themselves, detach from familiar contexts, and acquire new meanings through new constellations."
