Anatomy of A Wave
The work began with an act of looking.
I started scanning moving images I found online, fragments of films, anonymous footage, moments
from different times. A scanner normally records stillness, line by line, but here it met motion, time,
speed, distance, and space. From that encounter, a new kind of image emerged, one that carries its
own logic of time and light. The process itself became the language. The movement of the video, the
rhythm of my hand, the speed of the scan, the light of the screen, all of it shaped each image. What
emerged was not photography, not painting, not engraving, but a surface built from gesture and
light, as if the gesture were a kind of breathing.
I have long been concerned with abstraction, the abstraction of the body, of self as memory and
forgetting, as a territory with presence and disappearance. Here, the sea becomes that territory of
transformation. The wave appears, dissolves, reforms; the boat, the air, the fish, the birds, all seem
to shift between visibility and erasure. Sometimes everything becomes pattern, vibration, or
frequency, something close to sound, something you can almost feel rather than see.
Each image is an instant where the past and the present blur. It is not about recovering what was
lost, but about how the present redefines what remains. In that sense, the work is closer to the idea
of time as an ocean, a space where movement is constant, where directions cross, where memory
and forgetting coexist. The gesture of scanning becomes a way of navigating through this ocean of
time.
For me, this work ties back to my ongoing explorations of abstraction, of the Black body, of memory
and forgetting. Here it is the sea and the pirogue, sometimes its passengers, that become
abstracted. It is an epic. The boat enters the wave, disappears, becomes pixel, vibration, frequency,
before resurfacing again. Across the series, this passage repeats: submerged, reappearing, always in
movement.
It is not about documenting a storm but about creating one, an imagined passage, a moment of
crossing where the sea itself turns into a metaphor of tension, survival, and transformation.
I began to think of these works as occupying a space between the estampe and impressionist
painting, but rendered through a contemporary, digital process. This digital impressionism does not
imitate painting, it extends its logic into the temporal. Instead of pigment and canvas, there is light
and duration; instead of a brushstroke, a movement through time. (...)
Mame-Diarra Niang
Æther
This place of my discovery sketches a subject filled with dots and spaces.
The gaze knows the path, the point to reach...
The spaces of resistance are punctuated spaces...
The subject of the self is more occupied with observing the points than occupying the spaces, the holes, slippages and intervals...
And yet, all of this is revealed in this unfolding world.
The blink that looks inside and outside of you... did you feel it? And yet, wasn't it necessary to feel it, to be present there?
Have you welcomed those bursts of light and color that pursue you in this negative space of vision, where within us it is dark, where the fall is infinite...
It's like the flashing of headlights... a signal... or that Morse code message, its reception. The beating of my heart between the spaces of my breath... Like a door slamming in a draught. Perseverance and renunciation...
What interests me now is what lies in between memory and oblivion.
Knowing which of the two is a point or a space? And how to jump from one to the other and add spaces and further points, becoming different, becoming free from all that I have been?
To be the space between the points... Ignoring my own metamorphosis.
You do not know yourself; you know points and some intervals...
And yet, you must confide in your own spaces, in the vertigo they give you, in that discomfort in your chest that refers you back to your own abstraction, to that place that confirms that you will only know your form after renouncing and ceasing to jump between the scattered points within you, which connect you and render you a monumental stitch.
Do you trust this void, this cliff, this foot you step into the expanse of yourself?
These moments where I continue to traverse allow me to map the resistance to being myself, present...
A creature made of dots, emptiness, and movements... That reflect me back to my selves only by accident.
Report from the space in between, Mame-Diarra NIANG
Sama Guent Guii
walked along with the lingering thought that I knew nothing about the history of my late father and the lineage of my black ancestors; my ancestral memory felt akin to the iridescent surface of a bubble, like a feeling of loss upon awakening from a dream impossible for me to recall.
This series feels like the abstract idea that I have of myself, the acceptance that forgetting is also a starting point and a fleeting, necessary memory. Sama Guent Guii, in which my memory is a dream.
We are never the same when we wake up.
I have to think about this more…
I see in me, deep within me, the traces of my ancestors. I am the past that resurfaces. A past that cannot be destroyed, nor diminished. I am the sedimentary rock of this fossilized past, the trace of living organisms... abstract in sensation... in reverie…
Where am I from? Who am I?
I am the past which reappears
I am what is transformed by their memories and my memories
I am these black bodies that I do not recognize
I am this blur
I am made of memory and oblivion
I am this monument of nature, this being that is continually being reborn
This other, who sees themselves as the other.
Report from this dream that I had, Mame-Diarra NIANG
Léthé
I told you so, I am new again.
I have accepted my own disappearance in my transformation.
It matters little to me what I’ve been: I am.
Report from Léthé, Mame-Diarra NIANG
Call Me When You Get There
You know, I always get lost in myself, and then I find myself again.
How can we lose sight of ourselves when we are motionless, compartmentalised within our
own bodies, confined?
From where I am I can no longer see the horizon. I have no perspective.
The memory of my freedoms is painful.
Tomorrow no longer exists; tomorrow, like yesterday, still looks like today, and I must
expand my territory.
I want to expand my territory, but all I have here are all kinds of emotions and my
memory. Invisible and intimate elements are suggestions of metamorphosis. I turn around
... they turn me to stone … painful shifts and inner rollercoasters.
My darling, memories are fading.
Memories, my love, tell different stories when you look at them twice.
And travelling through them is going around in glitches.
We must look at memories even when they are cut in half, partial, evanescent, uprooted ...
Returning to oneself is a journey that requires an act of faith.
I have a blank mind, I can’t even create anymore. All I need is to travel ... and see a world
that I can only experience through the screen of my iMac.
Never mind! Seen from here, Google Maps is a memory system, a guide that can help me
recognise again who I am.
Here I say goodbye to my living room, like a kiss on the forehead, with a promise of new
horizons ... maybe I can find a way there.
Yes! I’ll call you when I get there, I told myself.
The brain does not perceive the difference between what is real, virtual or imaginary.
There, I am finally freed from my shackles; it is strange because I am there and elsewhere ...
in a fantastic world, a liberating dream.
The act of looking never made as much sense as it does now.
There, what I’m seeing are people with a body that looks like my mind. People on the way,
but not anchored, severed in half ... vanishing … stretched ... I look back at them, I take the
time to observe them; they are memories ... they are fossils ... they are guides ... their trace
is still there.
I turn left, I continue straight ahead, I stop, and I continue to meet hundreds of
passengers in their own time bubble.
On closer inspection, they no longer have faces ... like in certain urban legends, they are
faceless ghosts that we have to face, as with our memories and our fears, to be free of
them.
I lift my head from the screen, I feel the exhaustion and the excitement of the journey.
Because I was there. I run to you, my darling, to tell you that I have arrived ... the illusion has
fallen, we can travel to other realities!
I know it, I have experienced it, I am no longer afraid of my walls.
With new memories, I am new again.
Report from the interior, Mame-Diarra Niang
Since Time Is Distance In Space
VIDEO PROJECT
Mame-Diarra Niang has presented chapters in an ongoing project titled Since Time Is Distance in Space at the Walter Collection in Neu-Ulm, the fifth floor at Stevenson Johannesburg, the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Recent Histories at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Dak'Art Off and Zeitz Mocaa, Cape Town . Articulated through hundreds of sequences shot in different places including Brazil, Senegal, South Africa and France, an immersive new territory has been created by Niang.
The project is a composition of memories, videos and collages; these explore and generate their own narratives, presenting scenes in infinite possibilities, propositions, repetitions through reconfigurations of time and evolving installations.
The work is a conversation about how the artist exists in the past, present and future - physically and psychically. The installation changes and interacts differently with the space it is presented in, each iteration being unique. This specific gesture represents in her work the present and Niang’s hyperpresence.
Each installation features multi-channel audio and visual elements. The rooms are submerged in darkness, the luminescence from the projectors being the only sources of light, creating an immersive environment. The various components, including the sound and images produced by the artist, reflect Niang's 'Metaphorical Body', a sacred space or temple where people are kindly asked to take off their shoes.
The Citadel: A trilogy
(Sahel Gris - At The Wall - Metropolis)
I was walking on an almost deserted path, a mixture of sand, laterite,
and concrete. I had lost my father, and I had brought him here, to the
Sahel, to be buried. This country whose soil I trod was nameless. It was
memory, anger, love, oblivion… perhaps renewal.
So that’s what had been left to me that was there: territory. I remember
that I felt like being on the moon, alone, witnessing an earthrise for the
first time.
At the place I was going to, on the horizon, a huge wall was growing and
by any road - any route - I was determined to reach it. One has to
understand that I was alone. The only human presence, the only
recognisable thing that guided my search, was the wall. And suddenly:
the wall.
At the wall, I knew I was at the gate of the citadel, an impenetrable
fortress which took shape as I wandered through the red rock paths of
my Sahel Gris. Here, as I took a taxi through the outskirts of Dakar, what
I saw were never-ending ramparts, this huge wall in front of everything I
wanted to see: myself.
One or two minute characters began to appear, isolated like I was,
faceless, anonymous. They were the people of the wall.
I understood that I was at the starting point of this territory: it is my body,
I am all that is visible and invisible here! So I was this citadel, almost
unassailable.
I finally managed to penetrate the walls – but those walls hid others. It
was a labyrinth. While I understood that everything here was my
territory, my thoughts kept pointing me to all directions. I refused to see
what there was to see. I refused to be an identity; all I understood was
that I was a vast, infinite territory and that there, in my journey, the
citadel brought me back to my own presence, to a monumental body.
The visible is not enough here. What is about to be seen is sacred.
I was in Johannesburg when I understood the mechanism of the
citadel’s walls. It was there that the Metropolis became clear to me. It
was there I could mark its traces. I was again a passenger in vehicles,
and I saw the landscape becoming abstract due to the speed of my
movements; when two street corners joined, it was just for a moment;
suddenly a straight wall rose in front of me, and I was moved. A new
reality was revealed to me, secretly guarded by time, speed and space.
The territory of the Metropolis can be found, but it is not anchored. One
has to move, to be present in every moment, without getting too
attached to what may become visible in the landscape, and then finally
to allow being captured in the paradoxes and aberrations which unfold
there.
Here, I arrived to the end of my epic, at the heart of the citadel, this
journey within me.
Mame-Diarra NIANG
