Informed by his academic knowledge and his family‘s experience with colonization (he is a descendant of Behanzin, the last King of Dahomey, present-day Benin), he (re)creates compositions that challenge European iconography, taking classical paintings and photographs and substituting the subjects’ faces with self-portraits. Oceane Kinhouande refers to his practice using the concepts “visual quotes” or “plastic quotation process” to indicate the artist’s choice to reappropriate and reinterpret previous artistic productions. Mivekannin incorporates archival material to expose the colonial gaze in those underrepresented or unspoken (non-dits), basing his work on the “memory of history,” literally and figuratively. His canvases, like palimpsests, bear various layers of content beyond the visual, as he uses old bedsheets, kitchen rags, and tea towels and soaks them in elixir baths following voodoo practices, a spiritual belief rooted in the Kingdom of Dahomey.
Mivekannin’s practice is deeply informed by two exhibitions he visited in Paris and marked his career: L’invention du sauvage (Musée du Quai Branly, 2011, curated in part by Pascal Blanchard) and Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (Musée d’Orsay, 2019.) Both shows led him to interrogate his personal history and the essentialization that resulted from the Western gaze on Africa and its representation in Art History canon.
Galerie Barbara Thumm presents the exhibition Human in Motion by Roméo Mivekannin in its project space, featuring pieces from his series “L’homme qui marche / The walking man” (2022-2024). Mivekannin draws upon the photographic study “Human figure in Motion” from British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who revolutionized the history of his field and cinema in the late 19th-century by “stopping action, capturing and decomposing movement,” according to the artist. For instance, Muybridge’s study captured people performing various movements which hephotographed with different cameras from multiple angles, rendering sequential, separate images. Mivekannin questions the notion of human in motion and reinterprets Muybridge’s photographs, employing sequential images of figures in movement to represent migration, memory, and time.
The artist draws a parallel between his migration within Africa and to France and Muybridge’s story as a British immigrant to the United States, establishing a dialogue between both figure’s experience with displacement. He points to an analogy between human motion and travel as a dislocation from a certain space at a given time, leading the traveler to question the journey while facing a sense of temporality and impermanence. The visual and material composition of some of the works reminisce the scientific and photographic grid that was used to captured individual fragments of motion, which Mivekannin depicts over used kitchen rags and tea towels to create canvases out of material fragments.
Mivekannin’s creative process entails observing a work of art and asking himself: “what does the artist really show?” What is the intention and context behind what is evident to the eye? Then, the artist decodes the original imagery of the works, substituting some of the models’ faces with a self-portrait in black and white and painting the background black, thus, shedding light on subjects previously relegated to the shadows of domination. Mivekannin’s choice is intentional and subversive, as it aims to reverse the points of view of the characters portrayed on the paintings and the passers-by that look at them. His face gazes directly to the viewers and grasps their eyes, stopping and transforming them from merely lookers into active, critical spectators of the scene. In his words: “with the same code, the same framing, the same arrangement of the models, I shift the gaze of the beholder from that of a simple voyeur to that of a spectator of the scene (…) to move from the suffered gaze to the chosen gaze.”
Roméo Mivekannin has participated in exhibitions worldwide including the Kunstmuseum Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2024), the 15th Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah, UAE, 2023), the Dakar Biennale (Dakar, Senegal, 2022) and other exhibitions in the Musée d’Art Roger Quilliot (Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2024), Musée du Quai Branly (Paris, France, 2023), among others. His works are in various collections, including Cité de la Musique, Musée National du Quai Branly, and Collection Leridon (France), Sharjah Foundation (UAE), Fondation Zeitz (South Africa), Galerie Nationale d’art contemporain du Bénin (Benin). He lives and works between Toulouse, France, and Cotonou, Benin and pursues a Doctorate at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Montpellier, France.
Text: Susana Turbay Botero
