Doff

Appolinaire Guidimbaye, known as Doff, born in 1983 in N'Djamenah (Chad). Lives and works in N'Djamenah.

Self-taught artist, Doff who initially wanted to be a mechanic will become an artist. No art school in Chad allows to embrace an artistic career, however, born in a family of artists, he is initiated very young to marquetry and quickly becomes an expert in the assembly of metals. 

In his first works, the artist recovers all kinds of objects, such as beads, newspapers but also lost balls and electrical circuits. Since 2019, he works mainly with paxalu a material discovered on the beaches of Côte d'Ivoire during a residency in Assinie.

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He creates beautiful works that are not without evoking the social, political and religious difficulties of his country. His artistic approach is based on recycling. He recovers shell casings near shooting ranges to denounce the ravages of internal conflicts in African countries and pieces of paxalu to alert on pollution. 

After years of civil war, Chad has been severely weakened, particularly in terms of culture and the arts. Today, the country seeks to assert itself and impose itself on the African scene by acquiring a new visibility. It is in this paradoxical context, divided between internal tensions and hope for international openness, that Doff began his artistic career as a visual artist and then as a stage designer.

He created the association Knock on Art, which aims to promote contemporary African art in Chad and would like, in the long term, to create the International Contemporary Art Meetings in N'djamena in order to offer the city a visibility that it does not yet have in terms of visual arts. A committed artist on a local and continental scale, he wishes to change the opinion on his country, by demonstrating that Chad is not only a country constantly at war. He has completed several residencies in Africa and Europe and has exhibited in prestigious galleries as well as at the Foire Afriques au Carré.