For Art Rotterdam, Contour Gallery brings together the work of Saidou Dicko and Anni Mertens in a presentation shaped by shared connections with fragility, materiality, and transformation.
Saidou Dicko approaches photography as a point of departure rather than a fixed image. His practice is informed by his upbringing as a Fulani shepherd in Burkina Faso. The Fulani are one of the world’s largest and oldest transnational pastoralist communities, historically organized around seasonal movement, land stewardship, and oral transmission of knowledge across West and Central Africa. This lived experience of mobility—of navigating territory, climate, and social borders—forms a foundational framework in Dicko’s work.
His images expand through painterly, botanical, and textile interventions, producing layered surfaces that oscillate between presence and absence. Silhouettes and portraits resist singular identity, instead articulating subjectivity as relational and in flux, shaped by migration, memory, and circulation.
In series such as Fragile and the shadowed people, vulnerability is not positioned as lack, but as a condition of attentiveness, care, and human dignity. Dicko’s recent international trajectory includes a solo exhibition in Londen, Paris, and in Atlanta last year.
Anni Mertens works with ceramics as a deceptive and mutable material. Through stacking, distortion, and surface manipulation, she creates sculptural forms that hover between body and object, industrial reference and organic suggestion. Her tactile surfaces deliberately mislead perception: what appears hard seems soft, what appears heavy feels unstable. In doing so, Mertens challenges how material, function, and form are read and categorized.
During Art Rotterdam, she holds a dual presentation both at the fair and at Prospects, following the recent presentation of her first outdoor sculpture as part of the Luxembourg Art Trail—marking a significant expansion of her practice into the public realm.
Their dialogue invites viewers into a space where looking becomes a physical, attentive act, and where images and objects remain open—unstable, shifting, and continuously in negotiation.