GRENOBLE.- Following up on the exhibition I Remember Earth, the MAGASIN des Horizons continues to explore ecologically engaged art practices. Interweaving poetry and politics, the Grenoble art center foregrounds the environmental awareness of predominantly female artists.

Minia Biabiany’s exhibition approaches the issue of ecology from a non-Western, and more specifically Caribbean, perspective. Thanks to its poetic, ephemeral form, the artist’s work forces us to take a closer look at previously ignored aspects of French colonial history, which is perpetuated through pernicious acts of covert violence.

Featured concurrently, the exhibition of Álvaro Barrios’s work brings the discussion to focus on the history of bloodshed in the Caribbean region.

Minia Biabiany​
J'ai tué le papillon dans mon oreille [I killed the butterfly in my ear]
January 30–June 7, 2020
Minia Biabiany’s oeuvre forges a dialog between the exhibition space and a meticulous installation of objects she fashions in-situ. She constructs her works from scrap materials or those derived from vernacular practices. Here, she invites the visitors to a sound-based corporeal journey toward a beyond—the beyond of her archipelago, the Caribbean.

Minia Biabiany weaves intricate connections between all her installations. The conclusion of one is the beginning of the next, as if she were drawing an “exquisite cadaver.” Her latest video Toli Toli (2018) ends with the following words: “Butterflies provoke blindness when they blow in your ears.” I killed the butterfly in my ear thus takes blindness as its starting point. The inability to see brings on the realization that we have lost the knowledge of our own land. This loss is the consequence of long-term policies of assimilation, of the powers in place which support forgetting, and of disconnectedness from our environment. Minia Biabiany’s exhibition compels us to feel and think differently, to perceive the flow of air, and breathe new life into repressed narratives. Being able to see and think; to think and feel.

Minia Biabiany was born in 1988 in Basse Terre, Guadeloupe. She lives and works in Mexico and Guadeloupe.

Álvaro Barrios​
El Mar De Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus’s Sea]
January 30–June 7, 2020
Álvaro Barrios lends the Caribbean Sea a spatial dimension that had been charted and flattened by Westerners. Inked in blue on the front and in bright red on the back, the silkscreen prints El Mar de Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus’s Sea) enlarge the subdivisions that compose the grid of a nautical chart and quantify the slaughter of native peoples and the exploitation of enslaved African population. The cartographic fiction comes undone. The mapmaker’s victorious, dictatorial grid is blown up to bits.

Álvaro Barrios was born in 1945 in Barranquilla, Colombia, where he lives and works.