PARIS.- The black body is at the heart of French artist Mame-Diarra Niang’s new series. She doesn’t want to define it, or tell its story. On the contrary, she wants to untie it from the ways it has been represented by centuries of Western narratives. She therefore seeks to make it abstract, through what she calls forms of non-portraits.

Each of the images in this tetralogy can be viewed as an evocation of the artist herself. "What constitutes me?" she ponders. Her personality cannot be reduced to a fixed, imposed or subjected identity. It’s made up of experience, memory and forgetting. As such, it is in perpetual flux.

It is this dynamic, this constantly shifting territory, that she explores.

In this work, initiated during a long period of confinement by re-photographing digital screens, Mame-Diarra Niang plays with the characteristic imperfections of conventional photography, such as blurriness, distortions and halos. Like a psychologist resorting to the inkblots of a Rorschach test to expose what’s hidden in the subconscious, she uses these contemporary imagery’s defects as projection surfaces.

"I am this blur," she says.

Mame-Diarra Niang was born in Lyon, France, in 1982, and lives in Paris. Self-taught artist and photographer, she explores what she terms the "plasticity of territory".

Mame-Diarra Niang has exhibited her work on numerous occasions, through monographic exhi-bitions, notably at Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2023-2024), at the Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg and Amsterdam (2022, 2021, 2017, 2014), or through group shows: Glitch. The Art of Interference at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich (2023), Unbound: Performance as Rupture at the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin (2023), the Sharjah Biennale (2023), the Hamburg Photography Triennial (2022), the Dakar Biennale (2022), the São Paulo Biennale (2018) or the Berlin Biennale (2018), to name but a few of the most recent.

Mame-Diarra Niang’s work has been acquired by major photographic collections such as MoMa, Sharjah Art Foundation, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, Frac Corse, Frac Réunion, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (Cnap), Soloviev Foundation and Walther Collection.

Niang published her first artist’s book, The Citadel: A Trilogy, in 2022 with MACK, a three-volume edition articulating her "personal yet analytical relationship with place".

She is currently working on a second book to be published by MACK.

Exhibition curator Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Raymond Meeks
The Inhabitants

Recipient of the Immersion program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, American photographer Raymond Meeks spent a long time in France in the year 2022. He photographed in the South, on the border with Spain, and on the northern coast around Calais, two crossing points for asylum seekers on their way to England. He has chosen not to photograph the faces of the displaced, but rather the traces and residue of their itinerancy. There’s a shoe in the dirt, a blanket rolled up on the ground, a jacket hanging on the branches... Meeks is especially attentive to the inhospitable spaces migrants temporarily inhabit: ditches, embankments, motorway roadsides, riverbanks, wastelands and other non-places. Even when not directly visible, rivers are omnipresent in his images. These waterways might even act as a metaphor for migration flows. There are also many obstacles–stony embankments, concrete blocks, brambles or barbed wire–which might only suggest the plight of refugees on a daily basis. The Bourgeois de Calais, as sculpted by Auguste Rodin, also appear in the series, bearing witness to the catastrophic history of the 100 Years’ War.

The project is accompanied by a text from American writer George Weld, who shares with Meeks’ photographs a similar approach marked by discretion and empathy.

Raymond Meeks (Ohio, 1963) has been recognized for his books and pictures centered on memory and place, the way in which a landscape can shape an individual and, in the abstract, how a place possesses you in its absence. Meeks lives and works in the Hudson Valley (New York). He is the sixth laureate of Immersion, a French-American photography commission sponsored by Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. The Inhabitants, a book made in collaboration with writer George Weld, was published in August 2023 by MACK. Raymond Meeks is a 2020 recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Photography and was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022.

Exhibition curator Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson