In his drawing practice, Sanou Oumar uses readily available materials such as paper, pens, and markers as well as the foundational elements of art including point, line, and plane to produce abstract and imaginary mappings of the world. Recurring motifs of circularity, repetition, combination, and expansion reflect his interest in geometry, continuity, and dimension while evoking a Buddhist mandala, which serves as a model of the heavenly world and all creations in the universe. The transposition of his drawings into wallpaper invites viewers to enter the artist’s world of geometric shapes, colors, repetition, and circularity. Expanding to the museum’s walls, the artist’s inner understanding of space and time as well as the ways in which he inhabits the world coalesce into an embodied paradigm that explores abstract and obscure languages, navigating displacement while locating possibilities of movement within the rigid cartographies of our colonial inheritance.
