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.

Exhibition curator
Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

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 witnessto 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.

Exhibition curator
Clément Chéroux
Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson