Mame-Diarra Niang: The Citadel, a Trilogy
The Citadel is a story told in three movements: mapping a route through discovery, loss, and renewal across the uncanny landscapes of contemporary Africa. In 2007, Mame-Diarra Niang returned to Senegal to bury her father after spending years away living in France. Her unequivocally intimate relationship with the African continent translates into a refracted representation in which the places before Niang’s lens are at once forensically studied and transformed into fabular non-places. In Sahel Gris, the outskirts of Dakar, where infrastructural projects lay abandoned to the dust, evoke 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 eerily drained of human life yet dense with its traces. And in Metropolis, Niang steps finally into the belly of the beast, looking outwards from within the crowded urban superficies of Johannesburg, dazzling in the southern light.
At the center of Niang’s vision is the notion of “the plasticity of territory”, in which a personal investigation of place becomes indistinguishable from the photographer’s own metamorphosis, and the landscape becomes a “material for producing many selves.” In these works, collected here to form a sustained project, a deeply personal but rigorously analytic relationship with place emerges, offering a complex, layered image to offset historic, imperially motivated Western visions of Africa as vacant land.
Three volumes housed together in an embossed slipcase.
About the Author
Mame-Diarra Niang was born in 1982, in Lyon, France, and lives in Paris. She was raised between Ivory Coast, Senegal, and France and is a self-taught artist.
In her creations, she chooses to explore the thematic of the ‘plasticity of territory’. Niang’s first solo show, Sahel Gris,took place at the Institut Français of Dakar in 2013. Her first solo show in South Africa, At the Wall, took place at Stevenson in Johannesburg in 2014.
Niang featured in MovinGrounds, 38cc, Delft, Netherlands Pictures from Another Wall, De Pont Museum, the Netherlands (2020), Travesías atlânticas, 4th Montevideo Biennial, Uruguay (2019), Recent Histories / Contemporary African Photography and Video Art from The Walther Collection at Huis Marseille, The Netherlands (2018); Affective Affinities, the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018); Strange Attractors, a curatorial publication project launched at the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018).
Other group exhibitions include O Triângulo Atlântico, the 11th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018); Deconstructed Spaces, Surveyed Memories at the 11th Rencontres de Bamako (2017); Recent Histories – New African Photography at the Walther Collection in New- Ulm (2017); the 12th Dakar Biennale (2016) SEX at Stevenson, Johannesburg (2016); Armory Focus: African Perspectives – Spotlighting Artistic Practices of Global Contemporaries at The Armory Show, New York (2016); The Lay of the Land: New Photography from Africa at The Walther Collection Project Space in New York (2015); Nine Artists at Stevenson in Cape Town (2015); 11th Dakar Biennale in 2014, and Le Piéton de Dakar at the Institut Français of Dakar in 2013.
Niang recently conducted a residency titled Black Hole at the fifth-floor space of Stevenson Johannesburg. The residency took the form of a laboratory in which she explored this term using video as a medium and as a research tool.
