THE CITADEL: A TRILOGY

The Citadel is a story told in three movements: mapping a journey through discovery, loss and renewal through the strange landscapes of contemporary Africa. In 2007, Mame-Diarra Niang is returned to Senegal to bury her father after spending years living in France and Ivory Coast. Its equivocal and intimate relationship with the continent African translates into a refracted representation in which places in front of Niang's lens are both studied and transformed into fabulous non-places. In the "Grey Sahel", the desaturated deserts outside Dakar, where the Infrastructure projects are left to gather dust, suggesting a state of permanent suspension between movement and inertia. "At the Wall" presents a prismatic interrogation of the surfaces and perimeters of Dakar, depicting a city strangely drained of human life but dense with its traces. And "Metropolis", Niang finally enters the belly of the beast, looking towards the exterior of the interior of the crowded urban areas of Johannesburg, dazzling in the southern light. At the center of Niang's vision is the notion of -plasticity of the territory-, in which an investigation personal transformation of the place becomes indistinguishable from the person's own metamorphosis. photographer and the landscape becomes a -material to produce several selves-. In these works, gathered here to form a sustained project, a relationship deeply personal but rigorously analytical with the place emerges, providing a complex and layered image to counterbalance the visions historical and imperiously motivated Western views of Africa as a vacant land. Mame-Diarra Niang was born in 1982, in Lyon, France, and lives in Paris. She grew up between Ivory Coast, Senegal and France and is a self-taught artist and photographer. In her creations, she explores her design of the “plasticity of the territory”. The first personal exhibition de Niang, Sahel Gris, took place at the French Institute of Dakar in 2013. Its first solo exhibition in South Africa, 'At the Wall', took place at Stevenson in Johannesburg in 2014. Niang's work was featured in IV Bienal de Montevideo / Traversias atlánticas Uruguay (2019); «Recent stories / Contemporary African Photography and Video Art from the Walther Collection» at Huis Marseille, Netherlands (2018); “Affective Affinities”, 33rd Biennale of São Paulo Paulo (2018); “Strange Attractors”, a curatorial publishing project launched at the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018). Sahel Gris: Swiss bound with fold accordion, full-bleed painted edges on uncoated paper At the Wall: Hardcover, coated paper Metropolis: Paperback, Japanese fold, coated paper