Praesentia

e exhibition begins with the word Praesentia (2024), sculpted and woven in aluminium wire that has a blueish sparkle, literally an invitation to materialise in the exhibition.

In the first room, Videre (2020) is yet another word-sculpture, made of copper and blown glass. Meaning “to see” in Latin, the word seems like a living, pulsating organ, a network of fibres and veins spread out on the wall, transforming writing into image and vice-versa. Copper—a recurring material in Myriam Mihindou’s work—is an energy conductor but also a medium of memory, in the sense that it evokes the history of its extraction by colonial empires in Africa.
Facing this is the series begun in 2022 called Le Patron consisting of various superimpositions of paper soaked in ink or tea, stitched and sometimes covered with words. The works of this series are fragile leaves that can also refer to the buried layers of a palimpsest, which the artist peels back and reconstructs through various marking and stitching gestures.

Myriam Mihindou engages in an archaeological process that is both private and historical, with some works suggesting traumatic memories. The second room of the exhibition immerses us in an installation consisting of six white tables covered in silverware forks mixed with sculptures made of raw earth or terracotta, on which handprints can sometimes be perceived.
Entitled Service (2000 / 2024), this installation evokes what so-called civilising missions impose: body control, discipline, and propriety.

Land being the site of resource extraction and exploitation, it is also where memory is deeply etched: the monumental photograph Immatériel (2016) depicts a mourning ritual peculiar to Gabon and the artist’s paternal culture, in which the dead are buried with all of their clothing. In the image formed by Myriam Mihindou, the collapsed ground reveals a stratum of clothing. By producing this image, the artist seems to be reclaiming a family genealogy and a suppressed memory.

In Myriam Mihindou’s work, the photographic act is often like a ritual in which bodies and materials are permeated by powerful, invisible forces. Images provide a way to materialise something that eludes understanding in the moment. The photograph Johnnie Walker belongs to an emblematic series called Sculptures de chair, begun in 1999-2000, when Myriam Mihindou lived in La Réunion. Every morning, she captured an image of her hand covered in signs and skin-piercing needles, like protective thorns. The other two images presented belong to the Déchoukaj’ series, created in Haiti in 2004 amid major political upheaval and the overthrow of the government. Following a violent confrontation with armed militias, Myriam Mihindou took part in a group voodoo trance to heal the fear and trauma she had experienced.

Next in the exhibition, two videos present the artist’s body in positions of constraint, which contain their own emancipatory powers. This is true of the video presented upstairs, La robe envolée (2008): in a static shot, the artist films her own legs as she successively peels off several superimposed pairs of tights, like skins, but also like prejudices and stigmata imposed on her body and psyche. Through what she calls a trance-performance, she effects a liberating slough.
Folle (2000) video projected at visitors’ feet. It forces us to look down at the artist’s feet a empting to pass a white line on the floor, amid overwhelming laughter. If transgressing limits and crossing imposed boundaries can lead to the verge of madness, the artist seems to reverse the stigma, making this madness into a space for resisting the established order.

In the last part of the exhibition, the artist offers various gestures of care. Fighting (2018 ) is a recording of a performance given with several people in Uganda during the Kampala Art Biennale. The video shows two performers in a trance, struggling with themselves to find a balance that will free them from traumas that have restricted their bodie.

The artist’s work on words, language and etymology is also a matter of embracing constraints in order to better free oneself from them. The series Langues secouées (2015-2021) is one of those appropriation gestures made by the artist. By probing the meaning of words, their tone, their history, and their circulation in time, she invents a new, powerful, poetic language. Words are rolled up, unrolled, stitched, copied, woven and twisted. They are a mutating body circulating among all the strata of the living.

The exhibition ends with two large sculptural installations: Fleur de peau (1999 - 2024) is made up of around one hundred soap sculptures accompanied by waxes and small ceramic works, attached to the wall with strings. Those soaps look like both fetishes and votive offerings, carrying the memory of the skins they brushed against, soothed and
healed.
On the floor, Amygdale (2018) consists of a series of sculptures made of wood, blown glass, and copper wire, which are a cross between roots and dowsing rods. The title of this work borrows a French term that refers both to the tonsils, the organs located on the side of the larynx that play a part in the immune system, as well as to the amygdalae, the location of emotional memory in the brain. The sculpted words Aer Bulla (2024) bring the exhibition to a close, hanging in the space like a bubble of air and balance that the artist invites us to find through a deep, radical reconnection to individual and collective bodies and emotions.

One discreet but central work in the exhibition evokes that constant search for spaces for sharing: Ayendoété (2020) is a sculpted word made of metal and coated in beeswax. From the Fang language in Gabon, the word refers to taking account of the sensitivity of one’s community, when wax produced by the beehive evokes the productive power of
the collective.