Ladji Diaby's spiritual furniture debuts at Lafayette Anticipations
Installation view.
PARIS.—
For his exhibition Who’s Gonna Save the World? at Lafayette Anticipations, Ladji Diaby presents an installation built from furniture found on the street or sourced second hand. Each piece has been transformed by the artist, echoing his mother’s habit of decorating and embellishing furniture in her home to imbue it with spirituality and a closeness to God.
Ladji Diaby uses furniture as vitrines for discarded objects, each work becoming a symbolic collaboration between the artist and an object’s unknown former owner. While these objects and artifacts carry little material value, they are perceived differently installed in an art space.
Through the act of exhibition, the artist interrogates the systems which determine cultural value in the West.
Taken together, these works function as talismans from this imagined new world in which the artist’s political, spiritual, and artistic aspirations converge.
Diaby’s devotion to his materials arises from a belief in their generative power—these are not only objects but mechanisms of self-liberation—tools that allow him to pursue a life beyond the destiny prescribed by Western social hierarchies for a Malian man of Muslim faith living in France.
The question—Who’s Gonna Save the World?—is rhetorical. Ladji Diaby considers the collapse of the world to be a necessary step towards its reconstruction. The artist proposes that, by embracing the world’s impending downfall, we can move toward new utopias and avoid repeating past failures. For Diaby, the world’s salvation is not the responsibility of any one individual; liberation can only come about through collective action.
Ladji Diaby was born in 2000 in Saint-Denis and lives in the Greater Paris region.
Curator: Ben Broome
Ladji Diaby is a French-Malian artist born in 2000 and a graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
His installations combine found objects, image, and video, blending political magic with social alchemy. His work explores the cultural, spiritual, and liberating dimensions of personal and collective narratives.
Ladji Diaby’s work was recently presented in his first institutional solo exhibition, No one has ever called their child hunger, at Kunstverein Nürnberg, Germany (2024 2025). His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions: Felicità 2025, Beaux-Arts in Paris (2026), Partenaires Particulaires: SUPPORTS, SURFACES, DISSÉMINATION at Fondation CAB, Saint-Paul de Vence (2025), as well as in Autohistorias at Beaux-Arts de Paris (2024), It was a hot day, a day that was blue all through at Galerie Crèvecœur, Paris (2024), and Gold Plated Prophecies at Forde Art Centre, Geneva (2023). Previous exhibitions include Is Something Missing? at FRAC Corse (2023), Target Group at Braunsfelder, Cologne (2023), the DNA program FEAR OF A BLACK PLANET at Beaux-Arts de Paris (2023), Les Urbaines at Espace Arlaud, Lausanne (2022), and DAHABIYY at 35.37, Paris (2022).
In 2024, he took part in a collective residency at Villa Medici in Rome, invited by the collective Les Chichas de la Pensée.
