Hyacinthe Ouattara Burkina Faso, b. 1981

Hyacinthe Ouattara, born in 1981 in Burkina Faso, is a predominantly self-taught visual artist currently living and working in France.

His creative practice spans a wide range of media—installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, photography, video, and fragments of poetic writing. Deeply rooted in ancestral memory, Ouattara’s work explores the organic nature of life and the layers of memory that shape our shared humanity. For him, matter is never inert—it’s alive, pulsing with history and emotion, forming a connective tissue between individual and collective experience.

Whether through thread or gesture, his work speaks to the fragility, complexity, and interconnectedness of human beings. His drawings resemble evolving maps of the self and others—fluid, open-ended, and always in motion—like networks of people growing in all directions.

His installations push this exploration further, using balance and imbalance as visual metaphors, and often drawing on spiritual and ritual traditions. You see this as well in his indigo painting series, The Heartbeats of the Earth, where works were buried in the soil of his home village of Diébougou—turning the act of creation into a rite of return.

As art historian Cindy Olohou writes in Mélodies Ancestrales, a monograph dedicated to Ouattara’s work:
“Hyacinthe Ouattara’s textile sculptures and installations form an intimate archaeology. He begins with personal memories, searching for the red thread that connects all stories—stories of tradition, of the world. His work is a poetic and initiatory journey through the transmission of emotional memory.”

Ouattara has exhibited internationally at major events such as the Cairo Biennale (2019), Dak’Art – the Dakar Biennale (2022), and the Havana Biennale (2024). His work has been shown in cities across the globe including Paris, Accra, Ouagadougou, London, Berlin, New York, and Kinshasa.

Since 2020, he has been developing an ambitious open-air museum project in southwestern Burkina Faso—a continuation of his deep commitment to cultural memory, transmission, and place.