Fair - ARCOMadrid 2026
Selebe Yoon is pleased to announce its second participation at ARCO Madrid in the OPENING section, with a dual booth of works by Senegalese artists Alioune Diouf and Fatim Soumaré. Find us at booth 9OP18.
On this occasion, Fatim Soumaré showcases two woven large-scale cotton sculptures from her global project “The Caravan’s Road” (2025), where each piece represents a vessel carrying the history of one place and of a collective involved in its creation. In these two sculptures, Falé cotton threads run from top to bottom in seemingly infinite vines, drawing an intertwined map. Wool offcuts from Amazigh carpets styled by the last cutters in Khénifra, Morocco are used to create these trailing lianas, which the artist calls Laxass (in reference to the Wolof word for the protective hairstyle) to to convey care at every stage of her quest for survival. The copper vessels, crafted by Mohamed Lidarssa in Tunisia, weigh down the vertical pieces, woven on a vertical loom. The gravity of copper adds tension to the thread, but also symbolises collaboration as not only a social but vital act that restores balance. During the work process, the artist called upon skilled weavers and crafts(wo)men to share their own, personal, knowledge through the act of collective weaving. The bubble formations on the vines, in biological jargon ”tumours“, reference the plants that heal the tree, a metaphor to the healing of cotton and its history. In “The Caravan’s Road”, Fatim Soumaré retraces the endemic presence of cotton as a symbol of interconnectedness across the African continent, paying special attention to its manifestation in ancestral craftsmanship. She examines the links between geographical and memorial spaces shaped by trans-Saharan trade, highlighting cotton’s domestication as the product of networks and exchange, as well as its role in colonisation. Through her collaborative journeys, Soumaré’s research focuses on techno-cultural continuities and divergences in practices, with particular attention to postcolonial transformations, social organisation, and modes of knowledge transmission, especially as there are today.
Alioune Diouf — “the one who slept without ever closing his mind’s eye” [Pape Samba Kane] — in the courtyard of the Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar, absorbed both the artistic legacy of the post-independence 1990s and the subversive vitality that defined that era. His work integrates the spiritual heritage and ancestral mythologies of the cycle of life into his artistic practice. His pictorial universe, both gracious and bewildering, is characterised by intertwined, zoomorphic figures, influenced by West-African beliefs and systems. In the selection of drawings presented at ARCO Madrid 2026, Alioune Diouf draws inspiration from the Serer spirituality, where the natural environment is considered as the source of knowledge and existence. The primordial cosmic egg, often seen at the very centre of his compositions, represents a microcosm of the universe, and the iconographic understanding relies on various cultural, religious and historical beliefs, symbolising the world and its soul. As the artist often says, the bird is the spirit, always awake and infinite, supervising one’s presence on earth—an ancestral ecology of life’s essence. Thus he imagines hybrid creatures to try and catch the spirit in its endless multiplicity, invisible to the naked eye. To accentuate this elemental understanding, Diouf uses charcoal and natural pigments to consolidate his attachment to earth. Full of poetry and compassion, Alioune Diouf’s work is about the most sacred, purest state of the human being.
OPENING HOURS ARCOmadrid
Wednesday March 4, 2026 | 11:00 - 20:00 (upon invitation)
Thursday March 5, 2026 | 12:00 - 20:00 (upon invitation)
Friday March 6, 2026 | 12:00 - 15:00 (upon invitation) | 15:00 - 20:00 (public)
Saturday March 7, 2026 | 12:00 - 20:00 (public)
Sunday March 8, 2026 | 12:00 - 18:00 (public)
Location
IFEMA MADRID – Recinto Ferial, Av. Partenón 5, 28042 Madrid
Pavilions
Connection core 5-7, Connection core 7-9, Hall 7, Hall 9