Born in 1964, Myriam Mihindou grew up in Gabon, a country with multiple cultures and countless languages where her father came from. She retains from this youth the taste for otherness and language. Arriving in France, her mother’s country, at the age of 22, she attended the Bordeaux School of Fine Arts before traveling to many regions of the globe (Reunion, Egypt, Morocco, Haiti, etc.). ). There, she immerses herself in local thoughts and traditions which animate her multidisciplinary practice, combining performance, drawing, sculpture, installation, video and even photography.
His interest focuses on the damage caused by colonial and postcolonial domination, on the erasure of memory, but also on encounter and ritual. Lending a curative value to her work, Myriam Mihindou is inspired by the concept of “ Relation » developed by the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, which is mainly based on the recognition of the particularities of each person, the possibility of change through exchange and the necessity of wandering. In addition, land Art, the work of Joseph Beuys and that of Ana Mendieta mark his work, crossed by the living and sensitivity to natural materials – beeswax, earth, carbon, feathers, tea, roots, cotton , hemp, etc.
« A PRESENCE IN THE WORLD AND A PRESENCE TO YOURSELF»
The synthetic retrospective of the work of Myriam Mihindou proposed by the Palais de Tokyo, in Paris – curated by Daria de Beauvais and Marie Cozette – brings together around twenty pieces or series, produced since the beginning of the 2000s. title, “Praesentia”, alone sums up the richness of his approach. This Latin term expresses “presence”, “force”, “influence” and “protection”, all notions which have long nourished the artist’s research: “ It is both a presence in the world and a presence to oneself she explains in an interview with Daria de Beauvais. […] So for me it is the presence of the body, the soul, the spirit and the consciousness of memory. »
From the entrance to the exhibition, Latin, from which a large part of the French language comes, stands out with a work from the Langues shakeées series, which materializes in space the term “further», traced in copper letters and blown glass. This series, started in 2015, is an exploration of the etymology of French. The words sometimes appear printed, taken from dictionaries, embroidered or sketched using natural materials in a therapeutic gesture. First confined to the sheet of paper, theseTongues shaken – around ten are shown in the exhibition – go beyond the frame to, in the words of Myriam Mihindou, “take the wall» and become sculptures, following the example of Furthermore. Thus, the word exists physically, in a tangle of copper wires. With this introductory work, the artist encourages us to open our eyes wide.
Indeed, the exhibition precisely shows the body, the central motif of Myriam Mihindou’s work. The body which enters into the circulation of the world and nature, with the series The Boss(in progress since 2022), similar to a dermis composed of multiple layers as resilient as they are fragile. The body sometimes precarious, sometimes enriched by uprooting ( Giant Algae II, 2022 ). The cathartic body, delivered from its fears by collective trance ( Déchoukaj’ 15 2004-2006), or even the ghostly presence of the dead ( Intangible 2006). With Service (in progress since 2000), the body has a more directly political connotation. On tables, dozens of forks surround imprints, in raw or cooked earth, of the artist’s hands. Or how colonists exploit the bodies of the colonized as much as the resources from their territories.
“I really wanted to think of the exhibition as a big world or a big body […] questioning the common, transmission, history, writing, politics,
le social. »
Installation viewFor a deeper memory of Oedipus (To High Memory) by Myriam Mihindou in the exhibition “Le Grand Désenvoûtement. Chapter 1”, Paris, Palais de Tokyo, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and the Maïa Muller gallery, Paris. Photo Aurélien Mole
A QUEST FOR REPAIR
Two videos, presented in additional spaces, complete these different experiences of the body.The Flying Dress(2008), by its device – mid-body framing in fixed shot – and its subject, is reminiscent of Freedom(1970) by Yoko Ono. Where the Japanese artist, of whom we only see the bust and arms, tries to free herself from the constraints of her bra, Myriam Mihindou, of whom we only see the legs and hands, tries to tear off her tights. In voiceover, a monologue is delivered in Spanish about shame and fetishization. It is also a question of the body being prevented in Full(2000), video in which the Franco-Gabonese questions the weight of social norms: the artist’s bare feet, seen subjectively, hesitate to cross a threshold, while cruel laughter echoes around her.
In the last large room of the exhibition, Myriam Mihindou continues these experiments around the body, the memory it contains, its suffering, but also its power. The series Skin flowers begun in 1999 and made up of fragmentary forms evoking ex-votos made in soap, raku or wax, combines the themes of wound ( Broken Noses and Lips 2019) and healing ( Lively 2019). The same fragmentation appears in the installation Tonsil(2018). These sculptures in wood, copper and blown glass pay homage to precious organs: the pharyngeal tonsils, which, despite their determining role in immunity, have long been removed by doctors; and the brain’s amygdala, essential for emotional regulation of memory.
Finally, to the fragile structures ofAir Bulla (2024), which celebrate balance and the collective, responds with a final video,Fighting(2018): during the Kampala Contemporary Art Biennial (Uganda), Myriam Mihindou accompanied performers in their quest for stability and harmony. “I really wanted to think of the exhibition as a big world or a big body, after our experiences of confinement, questioning the common, the transmission, the history, the written, the political, the socialexplains the artist.How can we think together about this world in which we are organically connected? It is therefore not a “public”, but presences which enter the exhibition.» The work which closes the route gives its name to the event,Presence(2024), sculpture in ionized aluminum rod deploying this providential and restorative term on the wall.
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“Presence. Myriam Mihindou »
October 17, 2024 – January 5, 2025, Tokyo Palace 13, avenue du Président-Wilson, 75016 Paris.
February 7 – May 4, 2025, Crac Occitanie 26, quai Aspirant-Herber, 34200 Sète.
