Ladji Diaby

Ladji Diaby’s work functions as a material record of the artist’s day to day life: comprising objects from his family home in Ivry-sur-Seine, often arranged alongside discarded (and now re-found) fragments from the lives of others.

His works are born out of chance and circumstance, a process of discovery that Diaby describes as magical. He treats his found materials with reverence; allowing them to guide his methods of making. Artifacts (instead of the artist’s hand) lead his processes. Diaby’s devotion to the materials he uses acknowledges their potential power to free him from a fate determined by Western social dynamics and hierarchies: his work becomes a tool for transcending societal restrictions placed on him as a Malian man, of Muslim faith, living in France.

He positions his installation alongside geological and bio-chemical theories of the anthropocene - the notion that the human impact on the earth’s systems has entered a new age - a point of no return inevitably leading to the demise of the world as we know it.

Referencing the title of an album by funk & soul band Father’s Children, the question of Who’s Gonna Save the World? is a rhetorical one. Instead the artist sees this downfall as a necessity from which we can rebuild, proposing that the acknowledgment of impending ruin allows us to step towards new utopias and avoid the fate that has befallen us.

In Who’s Gonna Save the World? and across his output, Diaby attempts to open a portal to alternative (yet reachable) dimensions. Collectively, these works serve as talismans from an imagined new world where the artist’s political, spiritual and artistic aspirations combine.

Curator: Ben Broome

Cover image: Ladji Diaby, untitled (2025)