Why do you need to know photographer Mame-Diarra Niang?

THE “non-portraits” by Mame-Diarra Niang at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation

For several weeks, a crowd of colored shadows has been haunting the walls of the ground floor of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. Like specters, these blurred figures photographed by Mame-Diarra Niang almost blend with their monochrome background, bordering on abstract painting. If we vaguely recognize heads, there is nothing to identify the features of a face and thus understand an identity. Like the impression of a face that one has forgotten, or the vague memory of an anonymous silhouette crossed, somewhere between dream and reality.

It has now been three years since the French artist began this series of photographs that we have come across more and more in recent years, between fairs and group exhibitions, from Dakar to Berlin. She presents a sample in her first monograph in France – an exhibition which, in her words at the opening, “talks about the black body, and my black body”.

However, within the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bressonthese bodies appear almost indistinguishable, lost in the middle of a mass of nebulous colors, accompanied here and there by intimate poems… If Mame Diarra Niang calls them “non-portraits”, it is precisely because these almost illegible images are placed in the antipodes of the genre, their vagueness illustrating both his need to reappropriate his past and his African roots in the face of the ambiguity of his memories and the invisibility of racialized bodies.

An intimate journey into the territories of its past

The vocation of Mame-Diarra Niang for photography came to her in 2007, when she went to Senegal to bury her father. This return to her roots encourages the young woman to use the camera to capture the country where she spent part of her adolescence. Wandering alone through her deserted landscapes, punctuated only by a few silhouettes and passers-by whose faces we can never make out, the artist produces luminous photos where the architecture chisels the sky, giving rise to compositions that are striking in their structure, their lines and their often geometric shapes, and their skillful play between voids and solids.

“These trips back and forth to these territories have shaped my artistic practice.”, explained Mame-Diarra Niang to the magazine Fisheye. The result was his very first book, The Citadel, published in 2022 in three volumes (Sahel Gray, At The Wall et Metropolis). If these images are not part of the itinerary of the Parisian exhibition, they nevertheless resonate with his more recent “non-portraits” by the name that the artist gave them: “non-places”, to evoke the liminal spaces and depopulated areas that she traveled for years, always maintaining a certain distance from them. By creating them, the artist begins to question the fleeting presence of his own body in these environments.

From glitch on Google Maps to blurring of screens

A global event will interrupt this field project. During confinement in 2020, unable to return to Africa, the artist began to search on Google Maps for places in Ivory Coast (where she spent her childhood) and in Senegal that were familiar to her: her school when she was small, the streets and houses which lined the paths she took then and which remain anchored in her memory today.

Also exhibited at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, the series Call Me When You Get Therecontains screenshots of these digital wanderings, in corners where the artist detected bugs in the Google Street View platform: here, a body sees its lower part disappear, there, the silhouette of a woman is stretched large on the ground. Like other artists before her, such as the Quebec artist Jon Rafman which also lists thousands of captures of the site since 2008, Mame-Diarra Niang thus explores the flaws in the system. At home, however, these bugs have a much more intimate resonance with her doubts and questions in the midst of a pandemic.

It is in parallel with this very domestic series that the artist begins to develop his “non-portraits”. In order to create this very particular blur, pronounced to the point of transforming bodies into colored spots, the artist photographs and rephotographs his screen, each new shot blurring the contours even more. Little by little, the subject then disappears into the abyss of the image… Just as the memory is lost in the depths of memory, leaving in our minds indefinite visions that will be swept away or transformed by forgetting and uncertainty.

“Mame-Diarra Niang. Remember to Forget”, until January 5, 2024 at the Henri Cartier-Bresson FoundationParis 3e.