At 41, Omar Victor Diop is one of the most promising photographers of his
generation. Self-taught artist, his work is directly part of the heritage
African studio photography by Seydou Keïta, Mama Casset or Malick
Sidibé, a genre whose codes he knew how to appropriate while moving away from them
emancipating. The work Omar Victor Diop produced in collaboration with the
MAGNIN-A gallery, brings together for the first time the last three series
emblematic of the photographer: Diaspora (2014), Liberty (2017) and Allegoria
(2021). In Diaspora, Omar Victor Diop chooses the art of self-portraiture. The
Senegalese photographer embodies eighteen figures of the diaspora in his images
African, with extraordinary destinies but forgotten by Western history.
By embellishing his images with football-related objects, he softens the charge.
dramatic while propelling its historical characters into the present. It
thus places them in the debate on immigration and the integration of foreigners
in European societies. For Liberty, produced in 2017, Omar Victor Diop
continues to highlight the African continent and its diaspora by offering
a universal reading of the history of Black protest. Through a game of
visual references mixing self-portraits and staging, the artist revisits
the significant events of this history, certainly differentiated by time, the
geography and scale, but linked by the same quest, that of freedom
too often hindered. With Allegoria, Omar Victor Diop begins a new
chapter of his work. The photographer tackles the fundamental question of
the environment and its scope on the African continent. His works are included
the allegory of a humanity concerned about a nature that could become nothing more than a
memory of natural history manuals. Man, abandoned to his painful
responsibility, gathers around him this Nature reduced to a
representation.
