Mame-Diarra Niang was born in 1982, in Lyon, France and lives in Paris. She is a self-taught artist and photographer.
In her creations she explores her concept 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 exhibition in South Africa, At the Wall, took place at Stevenson in Johannesburg in 2014, followed by Call Me When You Get There in Cape Town in 2020 and Léthé, as part of Rhe, in Amsterdam in 2021; Sama Guent Guii was exhibited at Stevenson Johannesburg in 2022. She presented The Citadel: a trilogy | Call me when you get there at Galeria Lume São Paulo in 2021.
Niang has taken part in group exhibitions including Currency, the 8th Triennial of Photography Hamburg (2022); DAK'ART OFF, 14th Dakar Biennale, Senegal (2022); Shifting Dialogues: Photography from The Walther Collection, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2022); The Art of Living, Fotofestival Naarden, the Netherlands (2021); Movin'Grounds, 38CC, Delft, the Netherlands (2020); Pictures from Another Wall, De Pont Museum, the Netherlands (2020); Travesías atlánticas, the 4th Montevideo Biennial (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 Neu-Ulm, Germany (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.
In 2017, Niang 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 as well as a research tool. Her first artist book, The Citadel: a trilogy, was released in 2022 by Mack Publishers as a three-volume edition, articulating her 'personal but analytic relationship with place'.