Romuald Hazoumè is a multimedia artist, best-known for his application of found objects to create visually compelling and thought-provoking artworks including masks and large-scale installations. The artist also works in various other media – video, photography, painting and sculpture. Hazoumè has manipulated found objects since the mid-1980s, and first came to the attention of the art world in international terms in 1992, when his work was exhibited at the Out of Africa exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London. Since then his work has been exhibited and collected by private collectors and institutions worldwide. The artist lives and works in Porto Novo, Benin.

“Today we have a big problem, not only in Africa: in Syria too. Thousands of people are dying in the Mediterranean, and we as artists need to do something with our work to talk to people.”
The Artist in conversation with Hannah O'Leary, 2016

Mon Gouvernement, 1997 serves as a poignant cry from the artist to the Government of Benin and encourages the viewer to plea to their own government and urge them to take responsibility for each crisis they are culpable for. The work made up of thirty individual flip-flop sandals, salvaged by the artist from the shores of Benin. By collating both right-footed and left-footed sandals, Hazoumè cleverly ridicules right-wing and left-wing politicians in government, illustrating them as interchangeable and two-dimensional cut-outs with two-faced allegiances.

Each sandal in the present lot could also be representative of one human – and as a group, they could be seen to represent a collection of faces, ranging from fishermen who work the shores where the sandals were initially salvaged, to those uncomfortably fleeing their home to seek new life on distant shores. Mon Gouvernement marks the first time Hazoumè made use of salvaged flip-flop sandals, and would only revisit this motif some two decades later during the refugee and migrant crisis of 2016, in a series where each sandal immortalizes and represents the lives of African migrants whose lives were lost in the process of crossing the Mediterranean.

Romuald Hazoumè’s work is included in the collections of The British Museum, La Fondation Zinsou, Queensland Art Gallery, and The Walther Collection. He has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the Saatchi Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Menil Collection and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art.