26-18: A Dual-Exhibition at Povos featuring Modou Dieng Yacine and Johannes Sivertsen

March 22 - April 27, 2025

Overview

Povos Gallery is proud to present 26-18, a dual exhibition featuring work by Modou Dieng Yacine and Johannes Sivertsen. This powerful showcase of contemporary genre paintings explores themes of migration, global citizenship, and community through the distinct lenses of two artists whose experiences as migrants deeply inform their practices. 26-18 will be on view from March 22 to April 27.

The exhibition’s title, 26-18, references the two neighborhoods central to the works of the artists: the 26th Ward of Chicago, where Yacine lives and works, and the 18th Arrondissement of Paris, where Sivertsen resides. Through their chosen subjects, both artists celebrate the resilient communities, the artists' neighbors and friends, that they engage with daily.

Curatorial text by Ayrika Hall:

A portrait is a site of crossings—where movement shapes presence and form resists fixity. Migration moves in kind—its traces carried in memory, its rhythm enacted in gesture, its weight inscribed on the body as it unfolds through space. In this exhibition, Modou Dieng Yacine and Johannes Sivertsen approach portraiture as a medium where these migratory histories take form–where currents, inheritances, and adaptations press themselves within the image. Here, portraiture resists mere representation, operating instead as a negotiation of presence, an archive of movement, and a site of being that sustains in flux. Migratory movement articulates itself through material, where each layer compels the next, form sustains rather than arrests, and identity registers as a continuum rather than a fixed point. Through this, Dieng Yacine and Sivertsen offer a vision of migration as an ongoing condition where the self is built and rebuilt in transit, highlighting diasporic life through accumulation, moments that shape the terms of visibility, histories that remain in motion.

Throughout his portraiture, Modou Dieng-Yacine’s use of color moves with velocity, depicting migration as an embodied force– a state of being where identity is shaped through histories that layer, converge, and reconfigure. His subjects: artists, musicians, and cultural workers, hold multiplicity, calling to the ways diasporic life is carried through memory as an ongoing process of becoming. Johannes Sivertsen engages the technical language of 18th century academic portraiture while redefining its terms of focus. Sivertsen foregrounds the 18th arrondissement of Paris, depicting images of workers, neighbors, acquaintances as an integral part of the city’s identity.

In tandem, Dieng-Yacine and Sivertsen speak to the narrative of movement, how in its fracturing, it builds, holds, endures, and renegotiates the conditions of seeing itself.

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Artist Bio

Modou Dieng Yacine received a French Catholic education, while the majority of Senegal was Muslim. This created a foundational bond with France and its culture but also bred a deep alienation from his Senegalese and African identities.

Alongside his entry into the National School of Art in Dakar, began the first Dak’Art African Art Biennale through which he was able to attend workshops with Joe Overstreet, Mildred Thompson, Leonardo Drew, Frank Bowling and Mary Lovelace O’Neal. Inspired, he began to personally explore the depth and possibility presented by a canvas, the imaginative lines and multiplicity of layers which can be continuously applied to its surface.

Moving to the United States he earned his MFA at SFAI in San Francisco. Moving past the perspective he gained while in Dakar, he began to open up his practice to new mediums. His paintings became, and have since remained, a performative act themselves. The topic, emotions and concept dictating the medium.

While accepting a position at PNCA, Portland, which he held for a decade, he began a deep exploration of the underground subcultures presented by the Pacific Northwest and its histories. Looking back on his experiences at SFAI and his time spent with Okwui Enwezor, he founded a gallery which would last for a decade as well.

In his current studio practice, using and appropriating the history of both painting and photography, as two unique contemporary mediums, he is able to layer, sample, mix and play on the theater of his newly found Black diasporic voice. He currently lives in Chicago.

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