Presented by MAYÌ ARTS Curated in partnership with Filafriques, Cameroonian visual artist Martin Abega’s first solo exhibition in Geneva brings photography into dialogue with textile, embroidery, cowrie shells and charcoal to consider what the body, memory and matter retain after transformation.
Cameroonian photographer and visual artist Martin Abega will present his first solo exhibition in Geneva this September with Sacred Languages: The Metamorphoses, a new body of work examining transformation not simply as change, but as a process through which traces of experience, memory and identity are absorbed, fragmented and carried forward.
Curated by Ngalula Mafwata of MAYÌ ARTS, the exhibition is presented by MAYÌ ARTS Curated in partnership with Filafriques and will run from 15 September to 31 October 2026 at Filafriques Gallery in Geneva.
Bringing together photography and works incorporating textile, embroidery, cowrie shells and charcoal, The Metamorphoses considers the transformations that take place across both body and mind. Ordeal, fragility, memory, transmission and regeneration emerge as interconnected concerns, with the female figure serving as one of the exhibition’s central metaphors.
At the centre of the exhibition is a deceptively simple question: what remains of us after transformation?
Rather than approaching metamorphosis as a clean transition between one state and another, the exhibition positions change as something that leaves evidence behind. Experiences alter people, materials and images, but do not necessarily erase what existed before. Abega’s practice occupies this threshold between disappearance and persistence, asking what survives an encounter, an ordeal, an inheritance or an act of becoming.
From Photography to Matter
Photography remains the foundation of Abega’s artistic language.
The France-based Cameroonian artist describes his relationship with the medium as “writing with light.” His early engagement with fashion, portraiture and beauty photography established an enduring interest in aesthetics and the human figure, but photography gradually developed into something more introspective: a means of observing the human condition and questioning the forces that shape identity, spirituality and inner life.
His predominantly black-and-white visual language, occasionally interrupted by colour, treats the photograph less as a final object than as an entry point. Images become spaces through which personal memories can meet broader questions about the mind, the body and human experience.
That distinction is essential to The Metamorphoses. Abega does not abandon photography as his practice expands. Instead, he pushes the photographic image beyond its conventional limits.
As questions began to exceed what the photograph alone could contain, the artist turned towards textile, thread, embroidery and cowrie shells. His use of embroidery also carries a personal history: the exhibition’s curatorial text recalls childhood memories of Abega embroidering his own symbols onto his school uniforms. Photography consequently becomes something that can be sewn into, obscured, fragmented, extended and materially transformed.
The image is therefore no longer fixed.
It becomes material.
Across the exhibition, this transition from image to matter mirrors the internal transformations that Abega is attempting to explore. Just as a person can be reshaped by memory, adversity, encounters and inheritance, the photographic surface can be altered while retaining evidence of what it once was.
Three Languages of Metamorphosis
The exhibition develops this investigation through three recurring elements: the headdress, the mask and charcoal.
Each operates as both a visual motif and a point of departure.
The headdress brings together questions of beauty, embodiment and transmission. Hair and adornment, including forms inspired by the Juju headdress, allow ornament to become a form of language while positioning the body itself as a repository of memory.
The mask takes the inquiry elsewhere.
Abega grew up in Cameroon surrounded by objects and symbols whose meanings he did not necessarily understand at the time. African masks were part of this environment and later re-entered his consciousness through encounters, conversations and artistic experimentation. Yet his work does not attempt to reconstruct a ritual system or claim mastery over the traditions from which these objects emerge.
Instead, he relocates the mask into a contemporary psychological and social context.
The question becomes less about what a mask historically represents and more about what masking means now.
Social roles, projected identities, appearances and forms of self-protection all function as contemporary masks. Abega’s inquiry therefore arrives at one of the exhibition’s central questions: “When our masks fall, who are we really?”
Works such as Body & Spirit develop this tension by bringing body and mask into proximity. Rather than positioning the two as opposites, the exhibition describes their encounter as a resonance in which histories and energies meet, leaving the visible and invisible to coexist.
The mask consequently becomes more than an object within the composition. It becomes a way of questioning identity itself.
Charcoal and What Survives the Fire
Perhaps the exhibition’s most materially compelling investigation arrives through charcoal.
For Abega, charcoal is connected both to his contemporary experimentation and to childhood memory in Cameroon, where wood fires and meals prepared over charcoal made the material part of everyday life long before it entered his studio.
Its reappearance within his practice therefore connects material experimentation with something remembered almost unconsciously.
But charcoal also carries metamorphosis within its physical existence.
It is matter produced through combustion. Fire has fundamentally changed it, but transformation has not resulted in complete disappearance. Something remains: black, fragile and capable of leaving another trace.
This material condition becomes a powerful analogy for the wider exhibition.
When charcoal encounters Abega’s photographs, it does not function simply as a layer placed over an image. It penetrates fibres, absorbs sections of the photograph, obscures some areas and reveals others. Changes in light can cause the underlying image to recede and reappear, but it can never return entirely to its original state.
That irreversible alteration allows the material process to echo human experience. People, too, are changed by encounters, separation, inheritance, adversity and circumstances beyond their control. Transformation, in this reading, is not necessarily about replacing one identity with another. It can instead mean reconstructing oneself from what has survived.
As Abega puts it, charcoal “reveals what remains after transformation.”
The Female Body as a Living Archive
Running through these different material and symbolic languages is the female figure.
Women appear throughout Abega’s work as figures of beauty, memory, transmission and transformation. The recurring presence has an autobiographical dimension: Abega grew up surrounded by his mother and five sisters, an experience that shaped associations between femininity and love, continuity, fertility, strength and transmission.
But The Metamorphoses does not restrict femininity to motherhood.
Instead, the curatorial framework considers the female body as a broader transformative force — capable of carrying, absorbing and transmitting while becoming something new without completely losing what existed before.
In Sacred Feminine, gestures and materials converge around the belly, transforming it into a symbolic point of origin and passage. Across the exhibition more widely, the body operates as what the curatorial text describes as a “living archive”: not a static repository but something continuously rewritten by experience.
This idea expands the exhibition’s treatment of memory beyond recollection. Memory can be bodily and material. It can survive through marks, gestures, inherited forms and physical transformations.
The body remembers just as charcoal remembers fire.
Finding the Sacred Outside Fixed Definitions
Despite its title, Sacred Languages does not establish a predetermined religious or ritual framework for interpreting Abega’s work.
The artist is cautious about assigning fixed spiritual or ancestral meanings to every element that appears within his practice. The exhibition instead understands the sacred through contemplation, attention and the less easily defined connections between people, matter, culture and memory.
This openness also informs Abega’s working process.
His practice is driven by experimentation rather than a completely predetermined symbolic system. Materials are permitted to behave unpredictably. Charcoal, in particular, requires a negotiation between artistic intention and the material’s own physical properties. The unexpected becomes what Abega calls a “creative partner,” making surrender and uncertainty part of the process of creating the work.
The sacred consequently becomes less an object to be represented than a way of paying attention — to the body, matter, memory, inheritance and things that cannot be fully controlled or explained.
It is an important distinction. Rather than offering African symbols as fixed signs to be decoded, The Metamorphoses allows them to remain active and unresolved. Masks, headdresses, textiles, bodies and charcoal create a vocabulary, but the exhibition resists turning that vocabulary into a closed system.
MAYÌ ARTS Curated Begins in Geneva
Sacred Languages: The Metamorphoses also marks a significant development for MAYÌ ARTS.
Known as an independent curatorial and editorial platform focused on contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas, MAYÌ ARTS works across publishing, conversations, curation and artistic creation. Its newly articulated Curated programme extends that editorial and research practice into exhibitions and curatorial experiences.
The programme is conceived around themes already central to MAYÌ ARTS’ work — thought, identity, memory and the documentation of contemporary experience — while treating exhibitions as spaces for research, dialogue and transmission.
For its first expression through The Metamorphoses, that approach finds a fitting subject in an artist whose own practice refuses to separate image-making from inquiry.
The exhibition is presented in partnership with Filafriques, the Geneva gallery founded by Carine-Olivia Biley. Filafriques focuses on contemporary African art and artists engaging questions of cultural identity and contemporary African experience. Following its opening in Geneva, the gallery expanded its international presence through fairs including 1-54 New York and London, AKAA and MIRA in Paris, while also developing plans for a presence in Abidjan.
What Remains After Transformation?
Ultimately, Sacred Languages: The Metamorphoses appears less concerned with defining what transformation produces than with examining what transformation cannot erase.
A photograph survives beneath charcoal, although changed. The body carries experiences that cannot always be seen. Masks simultaneously reveal and conceal. Textile and embroidery extend an image beyond its original boundaries. Childhood materials return unexpectedly within an adult artistic practice.
Across these movements, transformation is neither presented as complete destruction nor uncomplicated renewal.
Something persists.
As curator Ngalula Mafwata writes in the exhibition’s concluding passage, mask, body, textile, thread and charcoal become languages through which the invisible can be approached without attempting to completely define it. What remains may be a scar, a memory, a material or simply another way of seeing.
For Abega, this space between disappearance and emergence is where The Metamorphoses finds its central tension. Rather than asking viewers only to consider what people become through change, the exhibition directs attention towards what endures through it — what remains after fire, what becomes visible when a mask falls, and what an altered image continues to carry.
Sacred Languages: The Metamorphoses opens on 15 September 2026 and runs through 31 October 2026 at Filafriques Gallery, 18 Boulevard James-Fazy, Geneva, Switzerland. The exhibition is presented by MAYÌ ARTS Curated × Filafriques.
