The black body is at the heart of French artist Mame-Diarra Niang’s new series. She doesn’t want to define it, or tell its story. On the contrary, she wants to untie it from the ways it has been represented by centuries of Western narratives. She therefore seeks to make it abstract, through what she calls forms of non-portraits.

Each of the images in this tetralogy can be viewed as an evocation of the artist herself. “What constitutes me?” she ponders. Her personality cannot be reduced to a fixed, imposed or subjected identity. It’s made up of experience, memory and forgetting. As such, it is in perpetual flux. It is this dynamic, this constantly shifting territory, that she explores.

In this work, initiated during a long period of confinement by re-photographing digital screens, Mame-Diarra Niang plays with the characteristic imperfections of conventional photography, such as blurriness, distortions and halos. Like a psychologist resorting to the inkblots of a Rorschach test to expose what’s hidden in the subconscious, she uses these contemporary imagery’s defects as projection surfaces.

“I am this blur,” she says.

Remember to Forget is the photographer’s first monographic exhibition in France. Æther (2024) , the series that concludes the exhibition, is original and shown here for the very first time.