Children have always been the collateral damage — and often the soldiers — in wars. A recent United Nations report verifies that 8,521 children globally were used as soldiers in 2020 with more than 2,500 killed, and some estimates show that up to 40 percent of the child soldiers are in Africa. Emmanuel Jal, an author and hip-hop artist of Sudanese descent, has written about it, and now the artist Ahmat Tallafe, a French citizen born in Chad, highlights this dreadful fact at the Eugene Hotel in a show with vivid colors of anonymous silhouettes. Exhibition by the painter Tallafe, the first American showing for the 40-year-old artist, explores child soldiers and the state of corruption in several African countries. He does so, as a press release states, by using slender silhouettes, “introducing anonymity and multitude, which are part of his solidarity” with the different worlds he knows, yet questioning the “abstraction and representation, singularity and crowd, exile and migration.” In 2008, after studies in Europe, Tallafe returned to Chad, but unrest in that country forced him to France after a year, and he was granted political asylum. His works have been shown throughout central and western Europe.
Exhibition by the painter Tallafe is at Eugene Hotel, 222 E. Broadway, and runs until Jan. 15. FREE.