Mame-Diarra Niang

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

Remember to Forget is the photographer’s first monographic exhibition in France.
Æther (2024), the series that concludes the exhibition, is original and shown here for the very first time. 

Biography 

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.