PUBLICATIONS AND PRESS

Monographs

Remember to Forget

MACK, 2024

A carefully curated artist’s book, Remember to Forget is a tetralogy comprised of Mame-Diarra Niang’s series Call Me When You Get There, Léthé, Sama Guent Guii, and Æther.

The works reflect on the abstraction of the Black body and the artist’s refusal to portray Blackness for herself and for others. Niang’s concept of the plasticity of territory as a constantly evolving and shifting entity is at the root of her work and is expanded here through different modes of non-portraiture. In these images, the self dissolves, vanishes, recedes, refracts, and appears fragmented and blurred.

In the artist’s own words:

‘My work is about memory and forgetting. What makes a self? I have come to think of the self as a territory made of well-curated memories and erasures. Remember to Forget places us where being itself is a forgotten monument; where even the most persistent conception of identity dissolves in front of us. We have to forget what we were in order to become anew... Naître et n’être rien.'

Published as a limited edition of 500 signed copies.

The Citadel: a trilogy

MACK, 2022

The Citadel is the story of an inner journey, told in three movements. It maps a route through discovery, loss, and renewal across landscapes equally real and imagined by the artist. In 2007, Mame-Diarra Niang returned to Senegal to bury her father after spending years away living in France. Her intimate interest in the notion of territory translates into a refracted representation of the landscapes she rediscovered on this visit. The places before Niang’s lens are at once forensically studied and transformed into fabular non-places.

Sahel Gris depicts a no-man’s land where infrastructural projects lay abandoned to the dust. It holds the roots of The Citadel, its ‘ground zero’, where the continuous horizon line evokes a state of permanent suspension between movement and inertia. In At the Wall, Niang pauses at a place of rest and interrogation, an oracle, and the gate to The Citadel. In Metropolis, Niang steps finally into the belly of the beast, looking outwards from within the crowded urban superficies that constantly shift before her eyes, dazzling in the southern light. At the centre 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 landscape becomes a ‘material for producing many selves.’

In these works, collected here in an expansive and tactile three-volume edition, a personal but analytic relationship with place emerges. City names and geographic coordinates dissolve and become as irrelevant as the visions imposed on them across history and today.

SELECTED PRESS (CLICK TO VIEW)

1000 Words, 23 January 2025
Taous Dahmani reflects on the artist’s solo exhibition at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, describing it as an ‘experiential journey through the intensification of abstraction, culminating in the vivid presence of what could be described as breathing auras.’

Musée Magazine, 15 October 2024
While we ensue on the relentless quest of exploring and representing ourselves, Niang’s images remind us of the impossibility and futility of such a task as the self is constantly subject to being forgotten and remembered writes Amy Wei, reflecting on the artist’s solo exhibition at Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson

Vogue France, 14 October 2024
À la Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mame-Diarra Niang interroge les représentations occidentales des corps noirs: Review of Remember to Forget by Lolita Mang (Article in French)

British Journal of Photography, 16 November 2022
Lindi Mngxitama reflects on Same Guent Guii, writing, ‘Fretted and erupting, dissolving and disappearing into kaleidoscopic colours to (re)create themselves in spaces that dance beyond the borders and bondages of Black enfleshment thus complicating the very constructions and conditions of Blackness’.

NRC, June 2021
Concluding the efforts of an international group of institutions, ‘Galleries Curate’ presents an exhibition of Mame-Diarra Niang and Barthélémy Toguo works in which ‘both [artists] show variations on portraits’, write Hans den Hartog Jager, Thomas van Huut and Toef Jaeger.

Elephant, June 2021

Charlotte Jansen finds Niang’s ‘Léthé’ series beguiling as it reverses the purpose of the photograph. ‘Rather than creating a totem of the past, they constitute a deliberate erasure that forces us to forget.’