Anthony Ngoya:
The Sacred Fire Beneath Our Feet
17th October – 12th December 2026
Opening 16 October 6pm
Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix is pleased to announce The Sacred Fire Beneath Our Feet, Anthony Ngoya’s second solo exhibition at the gallery’s London space. Ngoya continues to work across a range of media to create installations that are distinctly his own. In this exhibition, Ngoya recreates his personal reading of the soil of his ancestors and his ongoing quest to explore his identity through family history, which unfold through glass and metal sculptures, ceramic sculptures with integrated sound, paintings, fabric works printed with images from his family archive, and video works.
About the exhibition
The exhibition grew out of the artist’s return to his ancestral homeland, the Republic of the Congo, after twenty years away. Born and raised in France, Ngoya traces a journey across two distinct landscapes: the inland, urban world of his father’s family and the coastal shores of his mother’s lineage. Drawing on personal archives and regional history, the exhibition explores where colonial resource flows and intimate family histories overlap, moving from the landscape directly to the body and to memory.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a stark contrast between the sacred and the profane, embodied in competing currents that move through the land. Libations of palm wine (samba) poured onto sun-warmed ancestral tombs stand in tense, direct conversation with the crude oil mechanically extracted and pumped through nearby pipelines.
Here, the “sacred fire beneath our feet” refers both to the lasting spiritual presence of those who came before and to the volatile economic forces tapping the earth’s depths. Through film, sculpture, family archives and sound, Ngoya presents return not as a nostalgic resolution but as an ongoing negotiation with a transformed geography.
Anthony Ngoya (1995, Limoge)
Lives and works in Amsterdam.
Anthony Ngoya completed L'Ecole Nationale Supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in 2020. He now lives and works in Amsterdam where he completed a reputed two-year residency, Des Ateliers. Selected solo and duo presentations include: Ghostly Matters, Gester, Genk, 2025; Within Them, Caroline O'Breen, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, 2025; Underbelly, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, 2024; Le Long Voyage, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London, 2023; The Act of Breathing, Horst Music and Festival, Vilvoorde, Belgium, 2022; Under a Flag, Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, London, 2020. He has participated in numerous group shows including .TIFF, 2026, Antwerp, 2026; Prospect 2026, Mondriaan Fonds, Rotterdam, 2026; Way of Going Home, Kunsthal Mechelen, 2025; Painting After Painting, S.M.A.K, Ghent, 2025. Flowers at Room Temperatures, De Studio, Antwerp, 2023; Real/Unreal, The Constant Now, Antwerp, 2022; Currents #8, Marres House for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, 2020, All in one, Kanal Centre Pompidou, Brussels 2019. Ngoya is participating in a group show Biennale de l'Image Possible ou BIP Miroir Miroir, Liège, Belgium in October 2026.
About Anthony Ngoya
My work aims at revealing emotion and beauty, often forgotten or ignored under the coarse and rough surface. It is the sublimation of fragments of memory that is forgotten and foggy, oscillating between real and unreal. In my practice this translates into using everyday objects often thrown out as waste or rubbish. They are used fabrics, industrial materials that I repurpose from their original functions. I transform these diverse objects into paintings and installations of ambiguous compositions made of confrontation of materials.
Artist Statement
Anthony Ngoya
Anthony Ngoya is an artist who reflects. He reflects the materials, he reflects the subject matter. He reflects the process. The result is the work with multilayer of concepts hidden behind a deceivingly simple, even primitive aesthetics that is in fact highly subtle and sophisticated.
The French artist's preferred media is humble, almost base found-objects such as used fabric, pieces of floor tiles in his old artist studio, or wastes found in construction sites. He faces these beaten-up materials which are already infused with meanings, and he goes down directly to see their innate beauty that is beyond the hackneyed concepts they are associated with.
Ngoya's work breathes. It is in good part due to the emergent artist's pronounced sense of space that he instills into every work and installation, combined with his almost seasoned use of colours. No less important is that by liberating the waste or used materials from narrowly defined connotations, the artist infuses new life into these otherwise useless objects, and they begin to breathe, inhale and exhale the fresh air endowed with new meanings.