Behind the enigmatic Hosties noires, a title borrowed from the eponymous collection of poems written by Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1948, Roméo Mivekannin’s new solo exhibition unfolds like a choral song of strange and fascinating voices.
During the First World War, black soldiers of the French colonial force in Africa, known as «Tirailleurs sénégalais», were mobilised for the war effort. In reality, this contingent was composed of soldiers from Mali, Senegal, Burkina Faso and French Equatorial Africa, Chad and Gabon. Some of these soldiers, particularly those stationed in North Africa, were allowed to settle with their wives and children, not without causing some tension among their French comrades, who were stationed far from their families.
It is in this context that the images inspiring Romeo Mivekannin for the show appeared. The artist delves into the archetypes of colonial imagery and is particularly interested in the postcards that French soldiers used to send to their families in metropolitan France and which depicted the women of the riflemen in the tasks of daily life. Between fantasies of exoticism, colonial ideology and fascination for the Other, these images bear witness to the ambiguous relationship between the metropolis and its colonies.
Painting on an assembly of sheets that have been subjected to ritual baths that give them their particular hue, Roméo Mivekannin reproduces in an act of reappropriation the images of these black women who have become image-objects under the mechanical eye of the colonial camera. The space of the painting thus becomes both a place of dialogue and a confrontation of the imaginary. Each canvas, like a veil, is made of light and shadow. The painter’s self-portrait stares us in the face from one work to the next and questions our reading: what do we understand of these representations from another century? How do they resonate today in the light of the contemporary?
In the second room, anachronistically, the surgical white light of a neon sign gives us the enchanting form of a letter written by a collector to the artist. A story of ambiguous correspondence, charged with desire and appropriation, fascination and repulsion for this « black form of otherness ». In the same way, the letters read from the piece If you want some, I’ll send you some (2021) resonate with words heavy with ideology and the primary reality of life on the front.
Elsewhere, in a worked chiaroscuro, Mes frères noirs à la main chaude sous la glace et la mort [My black brothers with their warm hand under the ice and the death] a suspended installation gathers the faces of Senegalese riflemen painted on newspapers. The years 1944-1945, in the middle of the war, appear this time in the headlines. In the background, the verses of Hosties noires by Senghor, a soldier, poet and politician. The verses, isolated from their whole, make their signifying charge clatter, a hypnotising flow in the half-light, a memorial to those whose names few know.
Pursuing his quest for meaning, Romeo Mivekannin gives a privileged place to the archive as a breeding ground for new imaginations. With as much subtlety as plastic power, the artist pushes us to question the construction of representations of black people throughout history.
