“Where are we going? My art responds to this universal question with light, memory, and the voices of women. It is a path toward repair, a sanctuary where silence becomes resilience and pain transforms into beauty.”
Owanto is a multi-cultural Gabonese artist whose practice spans over four decades. Raised in Libreville, Gabon, and later educated in Philosophy, Literature, and Languages at the Institut Catholique de Paris in Madrid, she inhabits a space between continents, histories, and cultural legacies.
Her multidisciplinary approach engages photography, sculpture, painting, video, sound, installation, and performance to examine memory—both personal and collective—and to question the intertwined concepts of identity, transformation, and evolution. This commitment to consciousness and healing runs through her celebrated body of work.
In 2009, Owanto represented the Republic of Gabon with the solo exhibition The Lighthouse of Memory – Go Nogé Mènèat the 53rd Venice Biennale, marking the first time an artist from Central Africa exhibited solo in a national pavilion. Her title, meaning “building the future” in her mother tongue, foreshadowed her enduring exploration of archives and found documents to illuminate hidden narratives and inspire collective reflection.
Central to her practice is the question “Où Allons Nous?” (“Where Are We Going?”), a universal, poetic inquiry that drives her investigations of the female condition, emancipation, and the breaking of silence. In works such as the acclaimed Flowers Series, flowers both conceal and reveal trauma—masking pain while symbolizing rebirth. Her artistic proposals become listening platforms within institutions, introducing shifts in narrative and confronting hegemonic discourse with empathy and urgency.
Light, as both medium and metaphor, is a recurring presence in her installations and neon paintings, guiding viewers toward spaces of sanctuary and transformation. This belief in art’s capacity to illuminate, repair, and raise consciousness also fuels her activist endeavors.
Her most recent projects, including Traces of the Timeless, revisit painting as a form of self-discovery and spiritual connection—honoring the animist idea that all entities possess vital essence.
Owanto’s work has been exhibited internationally at major institutions, galleries, and art fairs such as Bucerius Kunst Forum (Hamburg), Chiostro del Bramante (Rome), Kunsthalle München, Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town), MADRE (Naples), MACAAL (Marrakech), Museum of Sex (New York), Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Washington DC), Fowler Museum UCLA, Dakar Biennale, LagosPhoto Festival, ARCOlisboa, AKAA Paris, and 1:54 London, among many others.
Through each project, Owanto reaffirms her conviction in art as a transformative force—one that sheds light on overlooked truths and invites us to envision new futures together.