Curator: Bernardo Follini
The exhibition presents a core of works representative of Binta Diaw's research on the relationship between the body and the landscape. The connection between body, identity and natural context constitutes for the artist the possibility of investigating the political and social processes underlying the themes of memory, descent and belonging, always broadening the field of experience from singular to collective. The selection of works in the exhibition traces different moments of Diaw's artistic production, from 2019 to the present, starting from the photographic medium with the series "Paysage Corporels" (2019 - ongoing), to video, "Being Body" (2019), and installation, with "Reeni Yakar - les racines de l'espoir" (2022).
"Paysage Corporels" is a black-and-white photographic series depicting portions of the artist's body. In their separation from the whole, these parts take on the appearance of natural landscapes, plains, hills, mountainous areas. Often the artist intervenes directly on the images with soft pastel colors, tracing the slender outlines of trees, fruits and roots, as if to generate, in the artist's words, "lianas of genealogies, laden with temporality through which it is always possible to discover, uncover and imagine the continuation of the story." The artist's black body and self-portrait are also at the center of the work "Being Body" (2019), a video documentation of a performance. The work captures a body dance composed of movements and breaths in close contact with a turf, in a forest filtering the sun's rays. The choreography gradually becomes an emancipatory dance, in which body and landscape unite and recede, as in a process of healing one's wounds, visible and invisible.Also in the exhibition is the installation "Reeni Yakar - les racines de l'espoir" (2022), a work part of the mangrove cycle. Inspired by the woody plant formations found in many areas of the African continent, these installations represent shelters constructed from braids of synthetic black hair, suspended from the ceiling until they meet the ground. The work is presented with a site-specific installation that employs a homogeneous ground cover interrupted by coves.
