Hamedine Kane The Resources #2. The Belly of the Atlantic #1 (detail), 2025, Installation composed of drawings on embroidered textiles, objects, pieces of fishing nets, and videos
Photo: Estudio em Obra / Bruno Leao. Courtesy of Selebe Yoon, Dakar
Porous Grounds, Sacred Codes is a large-scale exhibition project that takes you on a powerful and inspiring journey through themes of collectivity, migration, diaspora, and cultural identity.
The exhibition opens on 20 December, 2025, and will occupy the entire house of Marres. Porous Grounds, Sacred Codes is being developed in close collaboration with the renowned Senegalese art institute RAW Material Company (Dakar). From their team, two young and promising curators have been appointed: Haja Fanta and Ndeye Filly Gueye. In addition, RAW is organizing the preparatory online residency program and contributing to a thought-provoking public program filled with experts and in-depth conversations.
Collective process
Seven artists with roots in West Africa—Yacine Tilala Fall, Selly Raby Kane, Maguette Dieng, Ican Ramageli, Hamedine Kane, Eva Diallo, and Babacar Traoré Doli—are jointly creating a multi-sensory total installation incorporating sculpture, sound, textiles, video, and performance. While each artist maintains their unique signature, the extraordinary collective process of creation is central. The exhibition seeks to explore what it means to build an artistic universe together, in which every background and perspective is given space.
Right to Opacity
Inspired by the thinking of Anne Dufourmantelle and Édouard Glissant, the exhibition also explores the codes that remain hidden and the “right to opacity.” Nurturing the quiet grounds of culture supports the preservation of identity, while also serving as an act of respect and a source of intimacy.
Public program
Alongside the exhibition, the project presents an extensive educational and public program addressing themes such as heritage, cultural identity, migration, and the power of sensory experience. The program includes multilingual guided tours , film screenings in collaboration with arthouse cinema Lumière, workshops on West African traditions and music with DAR Cultural Agency, storytelling evenings, podcasts, and conversations with international experts.
News
Porous Grounds, Sacred Codes artist Hamedine Kane is participating in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, on view through January 11, 2026. His work Les Ressources: Acte-#2 examines the depletion of natural resources, particularly in the marine environments of Senegal and Brazil.
Curators
Artists
Yacine Tilala Fall (Washington D.C., 1997) is a conceptual artist whose work engages animism as both a material philosophy and a tool for destabilizing Western ideas of value, time, and language. Drawing on her Senegalese heritage and the country’s ethnomedicinal traditions, Fall explores cultural identity, lineage, and intimacy through clay, metal, organic tissue, and fiber. Her performance installations and sculptures create ensembles of vessels, sites, and systems that trace the relationship between the corporeal and the unknown.
Selly Raby Kane (Dakar, 1986) is a Senegalese multidisciplinary artist working across fashion, film, digital art, virtual reality, and photography. She launched her fashion line in 2012, grounding her practice in surrealism and avant-garde aesthetics. In 2014, she staged Alien Cartoon, a groundbreaking fashion performance envisioning Dakar’s future, which also inspired an album of the same name by the music artist Ibaaku. The following year, she directed The Other Dakar, a pioneering VR film revisiting Senegalese mythology. More recent projects include the film TANG JËR (2020), in which an eclectic community reflects on life in a Dakar street restaurant, Jant Yi (2021), a short film on extractivism and its impact on Senegalese rituals, and Penda Mbaye (2024), a photo series that transforms traditional dishes into surreal compositions. Kane’s work has been presented internationally, including at MoMA PS1 and the Guggenheim Museum.
Maguette Dieng (Barcelona, 1988) is a DJ, producer, educator, music programmer and dedicated explorer of music and sound. She is the co-founder of the Jokkoo Collective, with which she has presented audiovisual and sound works at festivals such as Atonal (Berlin), Norient (Basel), and Manifesta (Barcelona). She is also part of FOC, a self-managed cultural space where she creates sonic and artistic experiences rooted in community, purpose, and healing. In her personal practice, she attempts to translate the emotions and experiences of everyday life into sound in a poetic, sensitive and critical way. For her, sound is both a tool for socio-political and personal transformation as well as a bridge between distant realities and personal memories.
Ican Ramageli is a nomadic artist who works with video, photography, performance, painting, and music. For him, art is inseparable from the everyday realities of life. Ramageli explores new forms of awareness and action, driven by a belief that art opens up ways to engage with the complexities of existence and the urgencies of our time, to take a stand, and to contribute to change His practice interlaces the political with the poetic, continually reimagining our relationship to reality. As a member of the influential Laboratoire Agit’Art collective, Ramageli advocates for sharing, collaboration, and a relational “we” — expanding collective practices and affirming the importance of interdependence and mutual support.
Hamedine Kane (Nouakchott, Mauritania, 1983) is a Senegalese-Mauritanian multidisciplinary artist. Trained as a librarian, he first traveled to Europe in 2004 with a grant to study the book trade in Paris. Soon after, he settled in Brussels, where his artistic practice grew out of his own experience of migration. Working with film, photography, installation, performance, drawing, and engraving, Kane views borders not as barriers or limits but as thresholds — as spaces of passage and transformation.
Eva Diallo (1996) works with photography and extends to video and installations, weaving visual narratives from fragments, anecdotes, and her family archive. Diallo Diery, a long-term project, extends the documentation of the Fulani people begun by earlier generations. In it, the artist looks at her family through different lenses: taking images of themselves, for themselves. In Bolol, Diallo portrays her loved ones. She focuses on two of them who undertook to migrate to Europe. The artist often works at the margins of her subjects, capturing moments and details that nurture a sensitive understanding of aesthetic issues. Rather than contributing to the rapid consumption of images that are often generated around these topical subjects, she seeks the poetic exercise of deciphering – an act that fuels the imagination and opens multiple layers of experience.
Babacar Traoré Doli (Dakar, 1984) brings together diverse disciplines and social practice, concerned less with showing art than with living it. He devotes his energy to illuminating the work of others and has long been a driving force behind art in both public and domestic spaces. Growing up within Espace Médina, a cultural enclave in his family compound in Dakar, he developed into a leader and advocate for artistic initiatives. He has spearheaded initiatives including Dak’Art OFF, the Partcours Festival, and gallery Selebe Yoon, all while contributing to recuperative projects with Laboratoire Agit’Art and Set Setal. His work has been presented at photography biennales and festivals in Bamako and Cape Verde, at solo exhibitions in Senegal and Australia, and at numerous group shows. In 2018, he received the Creativity Prize at the Quinzaine de la Photographie Festival in Cotonou, Benin. In 2020, his work was selected for exhibition at the“Salon Géew Bi” art event of the Institut Français.
RAW Material Company
RAW Material Company is a center for art, knowledge, and society. It focuses on curatorial practice, art education, residencies, knowledge production, and the archiving of art theory and criticism. It fosters artistic and intellectual creativity in Africa. The program is transdisciplinary and draws from literature, film, architecture, politics, fashion, cuisine, and diaspora.
The organization is based in Sicap Baobabs and Zone B in Dakar. Zone B, a former 1950s Modernist-inspired home, was renovated as a starting point for research on the role of architecture and urban planning in shaping contemporary African cities.
RAW Base, the library, holds books, films, and other resources on contemporary art, with a focus on African practices and ideas. It is activated through book clubs, public programs, exhibitions, and installations.
RAW Académie is an experimental residential program for recent graduates in art, curatorial studies, and the humanities. It offers space for reflection, exchange of ideas, and collaboration, and is tuition-free.
RAW Residency — Kër Issa consists of several residency programs (open calls, local artists, the Académie, and guest practitioners). They provide space for research and exchange and often serve as a springboard for long-term collaborations.
rawmaterialcompany.org
Grand opening Porous Grounds, Sacred Codes
With great pleasure, Marres invites you to the festive opening of the group exhibition Porous Grounds, Sacred Codes.
Date: Saturday 20 December 2025
Time: 5PM
Location: Marres, Maastricht
free entrance
Press
For press requests, imagery and interview requests, please contact communicatie@marres.org
Partners / thanks to:
The support of Cultuurfonds & VSBfonds
Marres receives structural support from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Province of Limburg and the Municipality of Maastricht.
RAW Material Company, DAR Cultural Agency