© Serge Niango Born in 1995 in Bonoua, Ivory Coast, Assoukrou Aké lives and works in Abidjan. Aké is a multidisciplinary artist, who freely explores different plastic forms ranging from installation to sculpture, through engraving and textile works, to elaborate what he calls ‘a healing narrative’. His work bears the traces of Africa’s social, medical and political history as well as his personal history of cultural dualities, silences and revealed words. The artist succeeds in mixing drama, humour and poetry in sensitive works that revolve around the practice of counter-gesture and the search for the reverse. “The characters that I bring to life in my work constitute, through fragments and through a kind of constellation, an archive of African consciousness that mixes the sacred and the profane to better reveal the essence of human life, that of a fragmented identity that needs to be reinvented.”