AWL is delighted to present MOLAWA VIII, Jules Carlito Beurrier-Loncan’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view from 7 November 2026 to 9 January 2027.
The exhibition takes as its point of departure the story of Molawa VIII, a chief born between 1800 and 1805 in Litakou, present-day Dithakong, South Africa. In 1830, French collectors and taxidermists Jules and Édouard Verreaux acquired his remains and preserved them through taxidermy. From 1916 to 1997, his body was displayed at the Darder Museum in Banyoles, dressed in a loincloth and feather headdress and holding a spear. Following a campaign initiated by Alphonse Arcelin in 1991, the body was removed from the museum in 1997 and repatriated to Botswana, where it was buried in 2000. It was later established that Botswana was probably not Molawa’s homeland. His name remained unknown for nearly two centuries.
MOLAWA VIII emerges from this unresolved history, conceived as a continuation of the silence surrounding Molawa and as a funeral ceremony that he never received in Catalonia. The exhibition unfolds through distinct spaces, bringing together fragments, artifacts, found objects, and images printed on wood. These elements form an initiatory path through which Beurrier-Loncan explores the construction of the self through individual and collective inheritances.
Molawa hovers over the exhibition, while recurring ceramic forms take on the character of funerary urns and become instruments in a musical performance by the artist, situated between mass and meditation. Images of Molawa’s face appear on wooden panels, evoking his features as if in a mirror, while found objects become specters and surfaces become sites to be continually questioned in the construction of new mythologies.
At the genesis of the exhibition is a question of migration and self-formation: how does one build oneself within a landscape hostile to self-affirmation?
