THINGS AND SOMETHING TO REMEMBER BEFORE DAYLIGHT
ALMINE RECH . PARIS . FRANCE
2024
Curator : Jérôme Sans
Exceptionally, the show brings together Joël Andrianomearisoa’s extraordinarily diverse variety of preferred media to, in a sense, lay bare his vocabulary. Neon lights, sound, poetry, paintings, tapestries, sculptures, everyday objects – like so many elements of his visual language, brought together in a narrow relationship with handicrafts. The exhibition is not so much a celebration of savoir-faire than an investigation of faire, or the act of making, in what appears as an ode to manual work rather than the prefabricated or industrialised. In keeping with the cold, timeless aesthetics of Minimalism, the artist – albeit paradoxically – successfully includes gesture, individuality, voice, poetry and emotion.
© Nicolas Brasseur
Each of the gallery’s spaces appears like a territory serving to investigate new approaches to painting, through the many ways in which textiles can be worked by hand. Cut and sewn, spun and woven, knotted or embroidered, textiles become a thread running through the exhibition, linking one room to the next. Like so many reflections and works on memory and on the human hand, the materials are stuck together and transformed to tell new stories. Here, by manipulating textiles as much as words, the artist comes up with new possibilities – things and something to remember before daylight, as the show’s title poetically suggests – whose invention suggests an interweaving of dreams after nightfall.
Like sound scores animating the space with new energy, his large curtain-paintings redesign the gallery rooms. These non-rigid walls seem to remap the space and open up new ways of moving around, new perceptions. Made up of a variety of textile strips, mixed together and transformed into multilayered abstract paintings, these collage-like hanging elements imbue the exhibition space with a sensory dimension that invites the beholder on a journey from one world to another, like airlocks leading to new entries. The curtains’ near-Proustian quality conveys many memories, sensory remembrances harking back to other scenarios, like distant echoes. The material speaks out in the shadow of itself, in its own silence.
Here, nothing is instantly crystal-clear: the works must be discovered along the way, through the fabrics. Andrianomearisoa turns the exhibition space into his own labyrinth, his own formal laboratory, to reflect the inherent plurality and complexity that lies within each of us, and in the world around us.
The dainty, double-sided curtain-paintings express the brittleness and vulnerability of human experience, but also all our oft-conflicting layers of thoughts and feelings. The two sides, in keeping with the diversity of works on show and their compositional polyphony, are a poetic nod to the plurality of beings and emotions, to their endless shades. Halfway between two timeframes, two romanticisms, two sentimentalities, Joël Andrianomearisoa plays with the poetry of duality. Things and Something to Remember Before Daylight shines light on in-between states and turns the gallery into a threshold space where two realities may coexist: dreams and reality, day and night, time and multifarious, almost indescribable spaces.
His works are produced in Madagascar, Tunisia, Belgium or France; they constantly travel between worlds and languages, naturally switching between French, Malagasy and English. On the borders of many worlds, Joël Andrianomearisoa constantly cross-fertilises territories, know-hows, interstitial spaces and the diverse voices that make up everyday life.
Soundtracked by the exhibition’s title, the large room is home to Camelia Jordana’s whisperings; two neon lights, “Things” and “Something”, ambiguously suggest an open-ended poem, like clues, hints of hidden meanings. Six large paintings, in the same vein as series Les Herbes folles du vieux logis – the title is a tribute to Madagascan poet Maurice Ramarozaka (1931-2010) – recreate imaginary landscapes. In the next room, monochrome Aubusson tapestries – these are woven – appear. Hidden behind a curtain in a small room, embroidered texts are sporadically scattered around. Minimal sculptures made of plant fibres pervade the space. Materials become the re-arranged outline of a new story, like ledgers, like supports for text. Buried in the knots, hidden in the shadows, words are like a mystery waiting to be discovered.
In conclusion, Joël Andrianomearisoa – as ever – brings art into the real world with object editions that are sure to make the show go viral. Lined up on white shelves, many everyday objects: for the home, to wear, to give, to lose… they can find their place in the day-to-day lives of those who pick them up – a potential extension of the exhibition time.
Like a slogan or a poetic statement, Things and Something to Remember Before Daylight can be read in several ways, like a space with multiple entrances that has no start or finish. By brazenly changing the direction of reading, Andrianomearisoa encourages viewers to lose themselves in the intricacies of his paintings and words, to penetrate the mysteries of an impending sunrise, in the suspended hours of nighttime when everything is the stuff of dreams, reverie and sentimentality.
Jérôme Sans
Y SI MADRID FUERA MI CASA
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
FEBRUARY 17TH – MAY 11TH. 2024
Curator : Joël Andrianomearisoa
Narrating geographies
Those of other geographies but especially those of the intimate.
This is beginning of the proposition Y SI MADRID FUERA MI CASA.
A process that Joël Andrianomearisoa has been implementing for some time around the globe, in the cities close to his heart.
After Paris… Antananarivo… and Chicago,
Now Madrid.
A formula in which he is more than an artist.
He becomes above all the host of a house!
An he invites his friends, his companions and his accomplices to his home,
to invade space,
to build the house of dreams and desires,
to discuss around the world and time.
In Madrid, in a spanish breath, la Maison becomes la Casa,
sensual, spiritual, conflictual, timeless and eternal.
A house of time is installed in Madrid.
Within time, the time of time.
LE CRÉPUSCULE DES PROMESSES ÉTERNELLES
FLOW GALLERY . ANTANANARIVO . MADAGASCAR
2023
This exhibition is the first chapter in a cycle that Joël Andrianomearisoa is unfolding across time and geography. This cycle begins here in Antananarivo, his hometown, where his last exhibition was held several years ago. In this exhibition, he brings together the hallmarks of his visual and artistic identity, drawing the strength of his aesthetic not only from the poetry and musicality of words, but also from materials such as textiles, paper and metal.
© Kevin Ramarohetra
LITANIE DES HORIZONS OBSCURS
ALMINE RECH GALLERY . FRONT SPACE . PARIS . FRANCE
2023
In line with Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work and his recent artistic interventions based on evolution and constant change, such as the recent exhibition “Decay: An Ode to the Impermanent” at the Buro Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Malagasy-French artist takes us on a journey through the history of his “Litanies des horizons obscurs” through 3 chapters during his presentation with Almine Rech.
First: the word. An emblematic figure in the artist’s work, the word is presented with the launch of a collection of poems, “Sentimental whispers”, in collaboration with Almine Rech Editions. This first chapter is complemented by the exhibition of three works featuring the artist’s verses.
© Nicolas Brasseur
The second chapter consists of three historic textile works. One set of 24 pieces ‘Labyrinth of Passions’ 2018, and a large piece ‘La Dérive des Sentiments II’ 2016. Joël Andrianomerisoa was awarded the 4th Audemars Piguet Prize for his work, ‘The Labyrinth of Passions’, exhibited at VIP ARCO-Madrid 2016, becoming the first non-Spanish artist to receive this award.
The third chapter is devoted to drawing. A medium that allows Joël to let himself be completely carried away by his intuition. These works, a selection of which was presented by the gallery at Art Brussels 2023, reflect the authenticity of the artist’s practice as well as his formal restlessness.
“Les Litanies des horizons obscurs” will round off this experience, during which visitors will live different stories through this evolving display. These textile pieces, presented at MACAAL in Marrakech, reflect Joël’s desire to return to the sources, as well as his interest in craftsmanship, by rediscovering ancestral techniques and bringing them to the forefront of contemporary art.
MY HEART BELONGS TO THE OTHER
CHURCH PROJECTS . CAPE TOWN . SOUTH AFRICA
2023
The other is a conversation with the land on the other side.
Land Madagascar.
Land not only perceived as a territory but also as an intrigue.
Rather a scenario named the other.
A display around the desire towards the other, the vital dependance towards the other.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
The other is a mystery yet the other attracts us
The other is intriguing yet the other inspires us
The other is a stranger yet the other calls out to us
The other is a geography and this land is calling us
The project itself is a metaphor
without giving the land its name
Thus the presence of the other, of others
The other of names full of symbols
To read, to quote, to dress and undress
The other is a blind map drown in the darkness of our desires.
ON A NEVER ENDING HORIZON A FUTURE NOSTALGIA TO KEEP THE PRESENT ALIVE
NOOR FESTIVAL . RIYADH . SAUDI ARABIA
2022
Curator : Hervé Mikaeloff
From Antananarivo to Paris, from mixed-media installation to Dior collaboration, Andrianomearisoa’s work is simply magnetizing. Inspired by the cadence of the city, his textural work triggers an emotional response in audiences of all ages. Unsurprisingly, he has been invited to collaborate with some of the world’s greatest names over the years.
ON A NEVER ENDING HORIZON A FUTURE NOSTALGIA TO KEEP THE PRESENT ALIVE
Using neon lights and metal, On a never ending horizon a future nostalgia to keep the present alive was commissioned for Noor Riyadh and speaks of love, hope and dreams. Or to use the artist’s words: “a sign, a light, a poem… The horizon is the playground for our eyes, but most of all, our dreams. Here lies the theatre of our affections, but most of all, our hopes. On the horizon is where we call for a new future whilst we dance on the wave of the present time, following the moment’s steps. Light is the essential ingredient that allows us to dream of other worlds, other times.”
With this installation, Andrianomearisoa invites you to question time, your horizons and, as always, your emotions and desires.
Hervé Mikaeloff
© Ammar Abd Rabbo
THE FIVE CONTINENTS OF ALL OUR DESIRES
ZEITZ MOCAA . CAPE TOWN . SOUTH AFRICA
2022
Curator : Storm Janse Van Rensburg
The atrium of Zeitz MOCAA welcomes a new, site-specific commission of monumental scale by Joël Andrianomearisoa. The Five Continents of All Our Desires celebrates relations and connections. Constructed from Andrianomearisoa’s signature material, black silk paper, six large-scale sculptures form a suspended archipelago in a poetic reference to land masses and geographies of the imagination. For Andrianomearisoa, the work speaks to both migration and language — and the ongoing search for zones of engagement and desire. He constructs a view of the world that is fragile, ambiguous, open-ended and about new possibilities for human contact.
© Dillon Marsh
The work is conceived in dialogue with the concrete interior of the museum, and what remains of the original silos of the building; it is both in play and in visual tension with its surroundings. Whilst appearing as large black masses, the thin and soft materiality of the work allows for subtle atmospheric responses to become visible — such as paper rustling due to airflows caused by human movement.
The Five Continents of All Our Desires is accompanied by a sound installation, and a display of 40 drawings—a first, significant showing of the artist’s graphic works. Andrianomearisoa has further collaborated with the Zeitz MOCAA curatorial team and retail partners of the museum to develop an exclusive range of objects that will be on sale. All proceeds from the sale of these items will go towards supporting the work of the museum.
This commission was made possible through a grant from Fonds Yavarhoussen, Madagascar.
Storm Janse Van Rensburg
OUR LAND JUST LIKE A DREAM
MACAAL . MARRAKECH . MOROCCO
2022
Curator : Meriem Berrada
Our Land Just Like A Dream is an invitation to experience relationships between materials, forms, and territories in a different way, challenging the commonly accepted boundary between artistic and artisanal creations. For its very first monographic exhibition dedicated to a contemporary artist, MACAAL has invited Joël Andrianomearisoa to occupy all of the museum’s spaces in an exploration of Moroccan traditional knowledge. The artist engages dialogue with diverse artistic perspectives in an immersive scenography, punctuated by a selection of works from the Fondation Alliances collections. The exhibition’s title is a verse, a chanted poem or mantra that speaks of origin and earth, evoking the infinite possibilities held within the material—raw material—that Joël Andrianomearisoa appropriates, reshapes, or reinvents. The artist is fascinated by ancestral textile arts, and has collaborated with master artisans for more than two decades. From his native city of Antananarivo (Madagascar) to Aubusson (France) by way of Udaipur (India), he takes pleasure in the juxtaposition of his own artistic approach with the excellence and poetics of the gesture crafts.
© Ayoub El Bardii
The works produced for Our Land Just Like A Dream were created exclusively in situ, making use of a diversity of traditional skills in an ongoing conversation with the people who practice them. The resulting works are his personal interpretations of Morocco’s artistic heritage as well as his tribute to hand craft, a vector of secular transmission. Sensitive to the materials that he encounters, the artist spans various mediums with commitment and with elegance. Wickerwork, metalwork, ceramics and embroidery are all in service to his poetic vision, through textile installations, metallic sculptures, or drawings on organic paper; all possibilities offered by the artist’s new host territory. This same quest for resonance led Andrianomearisoa to invite six artists to engage in unexpected visual conversations. Each of his accomplices—visual artist, actress, or musician—explores goldsmithing, textile, installation or engraving in response to Joël Andrianomearisoa’s lyrical odyssey. Our Land Just Like A Dream brings together material, vocal, and spoken word crafts to create a geography with multiple points of entry.
RANDOM DESIRES FOR A CERTAIN KIND OF ARCHITECTURE
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2022
Random desires for a certain kind of architecture was conceived during a studio master class that Andrianomearisoa gave to architecture students at Confluence Institute in Paris, in which the final exercise was to propose a project from a different approach to architecture, through alternative inspirations: a fragrance, a gaze, a taste, a piece of fashion design, … The artist decided to carry out the same exercise for this individual exhibition.
In Random desires for a certain kind of architecture Andrianomearisoa approaches architecture departing from emotions, words and moods, through pastel drawings, paintings, textile works and sculptures. The result is a surprising display of emotional rationalization, an exercise in balancing dualities, divided into three different acts: gesture, projection and volume.
© Sabrina Amrani gallery
The first part of the exhibition opens with pastel drawings, as a preliminary step to the materialization of an architecture, working first on flat surfaces and then elevating those concepts to three-dimensional structures. The drawings give way to vigorous paintings on canvas, where Andrianomearisoa introduces color in a furious abstract explosion of architectural projection, sentimental and nostalgic.
The exhibition continues with the new body of textile works Random Desires, which are executed by the artist as if architectural constructions, and somehow resemble building facades, with overlapping bricks and even windows. Using discarded and found fabrics, Andrianomearisoa knits architecture, weaves construction, and sews structures.
Finally, the volume is confirmed as one of the artist’s current interests in the form of seventeen sculptures of different sizes supported by a massive pedestal that dominates and occupies the space of the gallery, in a reaction of the artist to the very idea of the gallery and its function. The sculptures convey texts in the three languages that are part of the artist’s life: Malagasy, French and English, with the subtle and poetic lyrics signature of Andrianomearisoa.
Random desires for a certain kind of architecture answers the question of whether it is possible to make architecture from unconventional perspectives, randomly through time and through our desires, the desires of the world, an architecture for all.
Jal Hamad
LES PRÉMICES D’UNE MÉLANCOLIE INFINIE
STANDING PINE . NAGOYA . JAPAN
2022
To speak of melancholy is to speak of duality.
The duality of time.
The duality of emotions.
The duality of desires.
The duality of bodies.
The duality of our lives.
One day alive, one day dead.
One day smile, one day sadness.
One day here, one day in Antananarivo.
One day in, one day out.
A black day, a white day.
© Standing Pine
It is in the interstice of these dualities that Andrianomearisoa draws the meaning and the ardor of his work. Between the shadow of a black line and the light of white cotton, the work reveals itself. Here for his solo exhibition for the first time in two years in Nagoya, through textiles, he combines black and white but also draws an imprint in oil pastel on paper.
Vertical lines like the double beat rhythms of our heartbeats. Lines drawn sometimes straight sometimes interrupted like tears that flow without ever taking a single trajectory. Tears of joy or sorrow.
In this new proposal Andrianomearisoa transports us to his universe always filled with emotion. This emotion that he does not want abstract but always material like an infinite exercise. The materiality of emotions to be read without particular languages and above all without geography.
Joël Andrianomearisoa
JOSEP LE MONDE ET MOI
JOSEP THE WORLD AND I
JOSEP EL MÓN I JO
JOSEP EL MUNDO Y YO
CENTRE GRAU-GARRIGA D’ART TEXTÌL CONTEMPORANI . SANT-CUGAT DEL VALLÈS . SPAIN
2022
Curator : Esther Grau-Garriga I Quintana
An image, which links the work Les Nouvelles cartographies du désir by Joël Andrianomearisoa, in the exhibition Brise du Rouge Soleil (Aigues-Mortes, France, 2021), with the work monument A l’Anarquia (1976) by Josep Grau-Garriga, is the germ of the exhibition Josep le monde et moi. Bringing these two works together was intuitively revealing, and was the starting point for inviting Joël Andrianomearisoa to exhibit at the Centre Grau-Garriga d’Art Tèxtil Contemporani and at the monastery of Sant Cugat.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa .
The exhibition brings together two artists from different generations who have never met, with experiences and imaginaries belonging to distant places and times, but who are nevertheless able to dialogue on the basis of their common creative attitude.With very particular artistic expressions, and with a body of work that apparently have little to do with each other – beyond the use of textile – Andrianomearisoa and Grau-Garriga share a fascinating combination of passion and intimacy. their work, with their own languages and codes, converge in nuclear and transversal aspects, where roots, affections, links and a deep respect for the details of the lived experience, coexist with porosity, with the desire to be penetrated by new and diverse horizons. Monumental and intimate, expansive and symbolic, Joël and Josep share the same way of living through creation, while they create what they live they experiment, construct, elaborate and transform with different materials, avoiding frontiers… on the loom, on the sheet of paper, on canvas or in the space.
Josep le monde et moi undertakes symbolic worlds in white, black and red, colours that dress these rooms with traces of the physical worlds and the emotional universes of two artists who weave their world by letting the world weave them.
This journey is a small world of their worlds, which begins with the silent white of intimacy, the delicacy of memories, and the revival of affections. It continues with the dense black night of stillness, solitude, sensuality and infinity. and it ends with the illuminating red, the red of passion for the discovery of other worlds.
Finally, the world of the angels in the chapterhouse of the cloister of the Sant-Cugat monastery; dancing with the angels, by Andrianomearisoa, and Mort I resurrecció, by Grau-Garriga, two large installations that dialogue, from the mystery, on what is no longer earthly.
Esther Grau-Garriga I Quintana
LES HERBES FOLLES DU VIEUX LOGIS
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY . MILAN . ITALY
2022
Les herbes folles du vieux logis is the title chosen by Joël Andrianomearisoa for his latest series of works. A title borrowed from the Malagasy poet Maurice Ramarozaka and from his collection, the one who considered poetry as a way of being and living across multiple geographies.
This new series in three steps – pastel drawings, textile paintings, squares of golden silk threads on cotton fabric – is an opportunity to once again evoke one of the constants of the artist’s work: the alliance and the dialogue with this original material that are fabrics, linked to his homeland, of which he makes himself the heir.
Click here to access to the full version of Françoise Docquiert’s text Les Herbes Folles Du Vieux Logis
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa © Greta Belintende
AU RYTHME DE NOS DÉSIRS DANSONS SUR LA VAGUE DU TEMPS
CHÂTEAU DE VILLERS-COTTERÊTS . FRANCE
2022
Curator : Bernard Blistène
Joël Andrianomearisoa, a pioneer of Malagasy contemporary art and a well-known figure on the international art scene. He studied architecture at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris and immediately began to experiment with a wide variety of techniques and materials, which he uses in all possible forms.
A visual artist, with an appreciation of the written word as well as the many forms of poetry, Andrianomearisoa here creates a monumental work from a short text inviting the viewer “to enter into a dialogue with the world “. Taking words as a material to be sculpted, which he carves out in metal, he builds an architectural structure shaped like a sign on which he hangs the sentence, in order to encourage the visitor to echo his invitation.
Conceived between 2021 and 2022 and presented for the first time in the grounds of the Château de Villers-Cotterêts – the future Cité internationale de la langue française – the work is an invitation both to fully appreciate the power of words and to dream of a re-enchanted future.
Bernard Blistène
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
HISTOIRE D’UN DÉPART
TOULOUSE BLAGNAC AIRPORT . TOULOUSE . FRANCE
2021 – 2023
Toulouse Blagnac Airport and Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse (Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the City of Toulouse and Regional Fund of Contemporary Art for the region) have been working together since 2012 to present a series of exhibitions within the Airport in order to offer its passengers and visitors suspended moments, a breath of fresh air, and to create a real experience.
© Théo Verdier
ZARIDAINA . GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE
LE SILO U1 . CHÂTEAU THIERRY . FRANCE
2021
Through the installations he proposes in this exhibition at Silo U1, we can guess the artist’s path that combines a skill learned in fashion design and costume making with a training in plastic arts and architecture. The meters of fabric that he collects become for example sculptures under his fingers, both monumental and fragile. The crumpled, compressed and cut materials take place in space in geometric forms that unfold a sensitive landscape.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
BRISE DU ROUGE SOLEIL
TOWERS AND RAMPARTS OF AIGUES-MORTES . FRANCE
2021
Curator : N’Goné Fall
Brise du rouge soleil (Breeze of the red sun), carte blanche for the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa.
Around the towers and walls of Aigues-Mortes in France’s Camargue district, Joël Andrianomearisoa presents a sensitive, poetic itinerary of 18 installations. Reflecting his imagination and echoing the history of the monument and its territory, the prodigious layout created by the artist gradually appears, inducing a series of emotions and surprises. The visitor winds out a thread that interlinks different narratives – some told by the artist; others based on the monument’s past and our personal ventures.
Inspired by the memory of the ancient citadel-port on the Mediterranean coast, the Malagasy poet Maurice Ramarozaka (1931-2010), the lagoon and salt marshes, and materials from Camargue and other places, the artist guides us on an endless journey from tower to tower and along the walls of Aigues-Mortes in a tour resembling a long poem, like a roll of papyrus that reveals mysterious clues.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
LES HERBES FOLLES DU VIEUX LOGIS
DOMAINE DE CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE . FRANCE
2021
Curator : Chantal Colleu-Dumond
The 2021 Art Season is once again on the theme of nature, and the work of around fifteen new artists, including some original creations, as in previous years, interact with the landscape and architecture of the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire.
First and foremost, two fantastic artists, Miquel Barceló and Paul Rebeyrolle are celebrated this time. These artists both have a great energy and enjoy working with raw materials, playing with the thickness of objects and the textures of the tangible and of nature. With the power of tormented despair, they express their deepest feelings of the pain and joy of being, of living. Miquel Barceló designs an original artwork in terracotta and ceramic for a grove in the Historic Grounds, while the Château will house around thirty beautiful landscape representations by Paul Rebeyrolle. Abdul Rahman Katanani uses his own experiences of violence and suffering to present some surprising barbed wire nests in the trees throughout the Grounds.
As a stark contrast, Chiharu Shiota’s delicate dark and web-like fibres will take over the Lower Le Fenil Gallery, much like vibrant nerve cells, while the Donkey Stables house Carole Solvay’s subtle creations using wire and feathers. The colourful delicacy of Sheila Hicks’ work is displayed in the Château’s Grand spiral staircase, while Safia Hijos’ poetic creepers made from ceramic climbs the walls of the Stables.
For the very first time, drawings are exhibited at Chaumont-sur-Loire, in the Agnès Varda Courtyard Galleries, featuring the dreamlike and philosophical works of Fabien Mérelle, and the poetic worlds of François Réau and Min Jung-Yeon. A collection of prints by Jean Dubuffet takes pride of place in the Château’s Porcupine Gallery, with the extraordinary series entitled Les Phénomènes.
The adventure continues with Pascal Convert, who adds to his glass library and roots, unveiled in 2020, with an incredible crystallised child’s bedroom, while Chris Drury, who has already created a very beautiful Carbon pool for the Domain, brings a brand-new original piece to the Bee Barn. Last but not least, a never-before-seen outdoor creation from Joël Andrianomearisoa interacts with the plant world of Agnès Varda Courtyard.
These new creations, when combined with the artworks already on display, provide visitors to the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire with a wonderfully poetic and revitalising experience.
Chantal Colleu-Dumond
POUR NE JAMAIS RENCONTRER LA DERNIÈRE HEURE
MAISON MARIA CASARÈS . ALLOUE . FRANCE
2021
Curator : Marie-Cécile Zinsou
With the help of a guide and in groups, visitors discover the history of the Logis de la Vergne (listed in the supplementary inventory of historical monuments) and particularly the life of Maria Casarès: her life as an artist, a refugee, a woman of the 20th century. Beyond the traces left by its illustrious owner, this visit is also an opportunity to discover the work of the artist, Joël Andrianomearisoa. The summer of 2021 has a special flavor. It is the last summer where visitors can discover the house as Maria Casarès left it. Necessary renovation work could not wait any longer. In order to celebrate this particular moment in the history of the Domaine, we had to ritualize this mourning in order to welcome this new stage.
We asked Joël Andrianomearisoa to come and intervene in these spaces and to propose installations in the Logis, to put into perspective with all his sensitivity and poetry this problem of the passing of time and the traces of the heritage that remain.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
TRANSLATION OF ALL OUR LOST PASSIONS AND OUR FUTURE DESIRES
KUNSTHALLE PRAHA . PRAGUE . CZECH REPUBLIC
2021
Curator : Christelle Havranek
In the spirit of the Mail Art movement, Joël Andrianomearisoa strives to establish a new type of exchange between his works and the public, between his convictions and the reality of the world. To engage with the transforming spaces of the Kunsthalle Praha, the artist has conceived an epistolary project, which he calls ‘Translations of all our lost passions and our future desires’.
Joël Andrianomearisoa has decided to display this title in glowing neon letters on the building’s façade, and to write this text in his mother tongue: Malagasy. The decision not to translate a rare language, in a location where it has little chance of being understood, is deliberate. Not to translate is to avoid the ‘approximation of discourse which produces a new discourse”.
The enigmatic sentence invites us to consider otherness. Language and multilingualism have always lain at the heart of Joël Andrianomearisoa’s approach. As a multicultural artist, he manipulates words much as he does objects; assembling, combining and interpreting textures and texts from here and elsewhere, creating a protean, polyphonic work.
© Lukás Masner © Shotby.us © Vojtěch Veškrna
DANCING WITH THE ANGELS
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2021
Joël Andrianomearisoa does not impose certainty, he offers a sensitive exploration of this border which freezes all duality. He likes to weave in this gap, from a multitude of possibilities. By composing serenely in this in-between, he comes here to challenge the definition of a desire that ends up preempting pleasure. In a fruitful exercise of desire, never associated with its culpable counterpart, Joël summons the shared rhythmic allowed by dance: a space of expression and bodily freedom created with the Other.
Through the figure of the angel, both benevolent and invisible, he invokes this Other and brings him face to face in a game of reminiscences in several forms. It invites physical memory and pays homage, to learned shivers, to plundered ecstasies, to the part of the other that one carries within oneself. He suggests that we follow the intimate path choreographed with those who continue to live in each of us.
© Sabrina Amrani gallery
At the entrance of the gallery, like a commemorative banner, The Angels chant a succession of first names whose various sounds prevent any geographic circumscription. He says nothing about the relationship he has with those who carry them, those who have permeated him and whom he ends up
inviting to settle in him. Far from the alienating meaning associated with desire, the artist cherishes and nurtures these moments, these relationships, these inspirations. He makes these “openings to the world” indelible and celebrates them with poetic and aesthetic power.
Joël creates a walk from a multitude of artificial flowers gleaned online and around the world, whether or not they are a faithful reflection of species existing in Nature. Replicas of tulips, tropical flowers or agapanthus intertwine, tame and coexist in a totemic symbiosis. Further refining the already fragile border of dualistic representations, Joël does not decide between celebration and commemoration. The installation combines them without creating an amalgam. The artist-florist gives each of them the freedom to display themselves in their diversity by inviting them to inhabit space, together.
Conceived as a series of irregular landscapes, the series of drawings lets glimpse here and there, through its repetitive linearities, presences and absences, and reminds us that both are never absolute. Combining the precision of graphite with the indelibility of pastel, the drawings reveal traces
of memory lying on the reassuring softness of the textile fiber. Through an intuitive but never improvised arrangement, Joël Andrianomearisoa takes us into a sensitive questioning about what we are, through the irrefutable affirmation of desire. Without ever freezing in a geography, he whispers an answer to us in several voices.
Meriem Berrada
WE WERE SO VERY MUCH IN LOVE
MUSÉE D’ART ROGER-QUILLIOT . CLERMONT-FERRAND . FRANCE
2020
Curators : Christine Bouilloc, Nathalie Roux and Christine Athenor
In July 2020, the artist presented his project for Clermont-Ferrand, which was as follows: WE WERE SO VERY MUCH IN LOVE
“The phrase echoes like a nostalgic appeal alluding to a past love, a story from another time, a better time. But the idea is not love, not alone. We are not dealing with love, but rather with what revolves around that love, a love with a capital L or a love with a capital B (for break-up).
The temporality of love, its former time, the end, the separation, its present and what comes after, and how to put it right… Romance is ultimately a pretext for us to talk about our time, which is finally a time that remains unchanged, but which has certainly changed our perceptions – nostalgic ones that lead to the promise of an undoubtedly better future. That is why the proposition is divided into different stages.
© Juan Cruz Ibañez
The zero stage: a prelude that uses light to set the tone, the iconic title We were so very much in love, a word to the city, an appeal to the world. Then the fugue, as at the opera, with a curtain rising in the middle of the atrium. The drama of our affections, from transparency to opacity, will play out on that curtain.
Stage two: lacrimosa, a time for tears of comfort for the loss of a loved one; a distress that will simultaneously unfold in reflections stretching to infinity, like a mirror ball whose facets are a day of joy and a night of grief.
Stage three: black, a projection into sadness, sombreness, distress, like an impossible, dead-end inventory. One last time, the fabrics are there to remind us of the sensuality of beings and a last breath.
Stage four: remnants, the archaeology of our passions, the high points of vertigo, textiles projected among fashion dresses and, at the same time, windless Madagascan shrouds, the dead tree of my new life saying that we are not all dead.
Stage five: the promise. A long, tender piece of music marks the time of our heartbeats: boom; boom and again boom. Yes, we are alive, and even at four in the morning by the light of a smoked cigarette, desire will always be present.
Other acts will have their place in this project of timeless chapters, such as a scrap of shroud at the Musée Bargoin or textile scenes engaging the permanent collection of the MARQ in conversations. And to conclude, like a consolation, the public will be invited to acquire a few ‘sentimental products’ at the museum’s gift shop – souvenirs of that lost love or the wonderful romance to come.
To our finest emotions, long live love.”
THIS EVENING THE NIGHT DOESN’T WANT TO END
DOMAINE DE CHAUMONT-SUR-LOIRE . FRANCE
2020
Curator : Chantal Colleu-Dumond
At Chaumont-sur-Loire, Joël Andrianomearisoa employs a variety of materials from silk paper to textiles and plays on subtleties of light to tell a stunningly poetic tale.
A voyage translated from the night
materials of light and absence
the immaterial nature of the invisible world
black light to the green of life
melancholy
the first day, the last night
the infinite horizon
the geometry of the angle that brings tears
the present
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
Continuing the voyage begun with the piece I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE NIGHT, produced and presented at the first Madagascar Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, Joël Andrianomearisoa now brings his work to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.
The message of the night is not limited to the piece alone, but involves a total deployment of the cycle of night until day and its eternal repetition.
Five new productions punctuate each chapter of the account. The proposition is divided into 5 stages that translate the intangibility of this invisible world. A journey through the dark night of oblivion to the full daylight of life. Melancholy sets the rhythm, paper the expression and textiles the respiration.
Chapter 1: I have forgotten the night (Galerie basse du Fenil)
Chapter 2: Twilight (Cour Agnès Varda)
Chapter 3: Waiting for the dawn that will catch us on the banks of sleep (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)
Chapter 4: Full daylight (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)
Chapter 5: Never-ending story (Galleries of the Cour Agnès Varda)
SERENADE IS NOT DEAD
DALLAS CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM . DALLAS . UNITED-STATES OF AMERICA
2020
Curator : Laurie Ann Farrell
For the artist “serenade is a sentimental act, but above all, an act of humanity – a way to put feelings, emotions and desires back at the center of discussion. A way to address something we have lost in our society today.” Furthermore, Andrianomearisoa’s exhibition affirms that “seduction is not dead, emotions are not dead and we are (all) still alive!”
Serenade Is Not Dead highlights Andrianomearisoa’s architectural background through a carefully orchestrated grid presentation of his textile references to the body, serigraphic landscapes, appropriated and repackaged “sentimental products”, and sculptures offering a mini retrospective of the artist’s working methods. Viewers will connect to the artist’s visual explorations of love and longing (or “territories of desire”) through abstraction, references to the figure, conceptual appropriation, and photography.
Serenade Is Not Dead is supported by Nathalie Aureglia, Monaco.
© Dallas Contemporary Museum
TOMORROW, TOMORROW. THOSE ARE FLOWERS. SO HOW ABOUT TOMORROW?
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2019
The impact strength of the work of Joël Andrianomearisoa, the tracing he left in space, his mark, has always had an ostentatiously present character. The energy it generates continually recalls its presence, emphasizes the lack of time, a space created from chronological laws, an incisiveness that shakes the monochrome. This aspect that constitutes the totality of the artistic production of Andrianomearisoa plays with the no-time, highlighting its repetition, marking the rhythm of a not before and not after, when using references that sink their roots in ancient rites and therefore they seem to look to the past; what they really do is bring to light, in visual and spatial terms, the visceral beginnings of humanity, the non-chronological but inextricably constitutive roots of human nature and its way of being in the world.
© Sabrina Amrani gallery
The use that Andrianomearisoa has always made of different expressive tools is presented here in all its wealth of details that highlight the procedural excellence and the basic meaning dictated by the fold, the meticulousness: aspects through which the space reveals the secrets of color, its evolutions and its density. The operation carried out by the artist for this personal exhibition may seem at first sight a contradiction with what has been said up to now, especially if the accent is placed on the expressive and almost pungent force of the presented works, whose invisible needles annoy the air, or perhaps they stimulate their retreat to make room for the advance of a trinitarian or destructive dimension of any space-time division.
In fact, the division proposed by the tour within the exhibition space is a real ironic position, subtle and profound at the same time with respect to the conception of time. The questioning in relation to the most hidden meaning of the past, the most appropriate meaning of the present and the most probable of the future is investigated even more deeply when the artist uses these chronological compartments considering them as different moments of his artistic career and, therefore, using himself as a guinea pig.
The entrance to the gallery consists of the presence of a work entitled Dark Sky (2013), which acts as a representation of the past, but which gives the impression of being a door to the revelation of the work itself. The visitor is faced with having to deal with a game whose purpose is to find the real entrance to the exhibition space, which underscores the intrinsic difficulty of coming into explicit contact with the work and, once the correct form of entrance is found, light is revealed, the revelation is fulfilled. It seems like to be entering the creative process of the artist, that process made only of moments in which the form is revealed in its dimensionality and in which Bergsonian duration finds its vertex of expression: a temporary absence in which the creative gesture lasts in its absolute manifestation.
The second part of the exhibition consists of an installation that refers to the present: through a set of works, suspended or not, the artist’s most recent production is presented and what is visible here is not time, the work of art as such. The composite elements of mirrors, besides constituting the whole work, act as a visual game of reflections of the past and the future or, therefore, of their conjunction in a single timeless stage that develops in several directions.
The third and final part of the exhibition renders clear the artist’s radical questioning of the most appropriate meaning of these temporal giants by ironising about the customary conception of the future term, as well as shared expectations towards this temporal dimension.
The future is now so visible and clear that it is clearer than the present. So clear as to be declared, to be self-declared: a true visual tautology. Finally, what in reality probably this textile wall and its repeated words “Tomorrow, tomorrow” want to represent is a space trampoline, an immediate reference to the space of the present that also includes that tomorrow or that includes it without naming it. And you, do you like flowers?
Domenico de Chirico . 2019
BLUE TAKE ME TO THE END OF ALL LOVES
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY . MILAN . ITALY
2019
CARTOGRAPHY OF DESIRES, THE SPACE BETWEEN US
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . ENCOUNTERS SECTOR ART BASEL IN HONG KONG
2019
Curator : Alexie Glass-Kantor
The Encounters section at Art Basel Hong Kong, where large-scale sculptures and installations are shown, will reflect “the accelerated sense of absurdity at a time where persistent political revolutions and social uprisings are part of our new normal”, according to Alexie Glass-Kantor, the section’s curator for the fifth year running. “The theme, ‘Still We Rise’, explores thresholds between life and death, between collapse and resurrection.”
Over half the participants are from the region, she says. “Most of these artists are also not household names.” This year’s presentation includes eight site-specific projects and four existing installations (all the works are for sale).
The work consists of four lines of wood beams at different heights, from where 21 linen sheets with silk paper elements hang. One of the beams holds seven fluorescent lamps, which mark the acts into which the work is divided.
It is neither a painting, a sculpture nor an architectural assemblage, although it has something of each. The work is an installation that has different elements that refer to architecture, painting and sculpture, but also to love, desire, loss, despair and hope.
Gareth Harris . 2019
NO HABÍAMOS TERMINADO DE HABLAR SOBRE EL AMOR
CENTRO DE ARTE ALCOBENDAS . MADRID . SPAIN
2018
In Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work melancholy, memories and personal narrative are intertwined in the physical and emotional memory of the materials that the artist uses to build his pieces. The individual exhibition No habíamos terminado de hablar sobre el Amor invites the visitor to go through a story in six acts where structures, silk paper and textiles invoke memories and feelings.
The show extends beyond the exhibition areas of the center, invading the media library and other areas of the museum, in which the artist intervenes with textual works on vinyl. The work of Joël Andrianomearisoa is a research on light: as if he was a painter Andrianomearisoa works with volume, matter and light using, instead of pigments and oil, textiles and the color black as a point of departure.
© Sabrina Amrani Gallery
SUR UN HORIZON INFINI SE JOUE LE THÉÂTRE DE NOS AFFECTIONS
FONDATION ZINSOU & MUSÉE OUIDAH . COTONOU . BÉNIN
2018
Curator : Marie-Cécile Zinsou
The Fondation Zinsou hands over all its areas at the headquarters of the foundation in the Ouidah museum in Cotonou to the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa for a carte blanche in 3 acts and 3 areas, entitled: Sur un horizon infini se joue le théâtre de nos affections. This is the artist’s first large personal exhibition on the continent and in Benin. He occupies the spaces with a fresh rhythm, deploying installations, words, objects, images, sounds and moods assisted by the foundation’s entire team, friends and local knowhow.
Sur un horizon infini se joue le théâtre de nos affections is a sensory exploration that interacts with each individual.
It examines feelings, desire, the world, our time, a meeting for a day or forever, a departure, travel, a before and an after.
A constantly developing workshop of aspects and encounters in motion.
A world specific to the artist, touched by a duality where gentleness and a caress sometimes come up against coldness and fragility.
In cultivating that ambiguity, Joël Andrianomearisoa reveals to us the collective construction of an obsessive emotional architecture, sometimes dark, but above all sensual.
© Yanick Folly
ACT I
For the duration of a meeting or forever
– headquarters of the Fondation Zinsou in Cotonou –
The scene unfolds in a hotel somewhere in the world.
It is one of those grand hotels from another age, but excessively up-to-date.
From the reception to the gardens, from the wings to the stairs via the rooms and ballroom, glances dart and bodies meet.
Heartbeats – A fragile instant.
In time with these tremors, mirrors negotiate with our loving images.
A wild bouquet embraces the song of the distant land.
In a sentimental waiting room, sheets strive for perfection.
The drama of our society plays out In the Ballroom.
And a feast in the stylish restaurant already heralds the end.
Off to the station, the harbour, the airport…
ACT II
The Last Kiss
– Jardin d’Essai – Ouidah road-
“There, we curl up,
dream of the world
and above all exchange a last kiss
before sinking into the black light of oblivion.”
ACT III
After
Oblivion
– Ouidah Museum –
After the encounters come separations. Some will leave, others remain.
A boarding gate, a station platform, a landing stage at night, all buzzing with a thousand farewells.
Whilst upstairs, solitude is present in absence. Black tears are illuminated by the light of forgetting.
The gardens conjure up wonderful memories; handkerchiefs in the wind welcome our tears.
What eyes your eyes are, distant, so distant, so distant in the darkness.
Joël Andrianomearisoa
LE PLI
FUNDAÇAO LEAL RIOS . LISBON . PORTUGAL
2018
Curator : Miguel Leal Rios
In this exhibition, Andrianomearisoa presents works that, in several ways, are declinations of the possibilities of constructing spatialities that, generated by a process of repetition, establish the several declinations of our lived space, which is anisotropic. In fact, this selection of large format pieces, and a sound work that reinforces the project’s spatial nature, proposes both an intensity based on repetition and a hapticity that emerges from the sensual sophistication of the rigorous choice of materials, from their achromatism, and from our craving to touch them.
Waiting for the seventh day that will bring us together in the rest hours of the night (2011) is a sculptural set composed of twenty-four elements on a wall, shaping a tension between its material (paper), its near-weightlessness and the massiveness created by repetition (the iteration of paper sheets). This tension is antinomic; repetition, mass and weightlessness op- pose in the creation of an interstitially that cuts across the entire exhibition.
© Bruno Lopes
LES SAISONS DE MON COEUR
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2017
For Les saisons de mon coeur, Andrianomearisoa has borrowed the title from a poem in the book Petals By Malagasy writer, poet and critic Elie-Charles Abraham, an activist of nostalgia certainly resented with his exile when he wrote this book of poems in 1940, which is divided in the seasons of the year. This book of poems, interestingly written in French during colonization of Madagascar, evoques with nostalgia Antananarivo under French occupation in poems that talk about seduction and sentimentality. In his texts Abraham portrays life like flower petals, delicate and everchanging with the seasons, reactive to darkness and to time.
Les saisons de mon coeur is divided in two parts: light and time. The first part of the exhibition holds recognizable textile works by Andrianomearisoa, which are an evolution from his series of silk paper works The Labyrinth of Passions. In this new body of work, Andrianomearisoa retains the technique of his labyrinths, with their repetition and their accidents, to create representations of the four seasons soaked in the essence of his practice. These works, painstakingly sewn by hand with strips of found sophisticated and regular textiles, are hung on a structure, as if they were paintings, connecting the upper and lower levels of the gallery, This structure, which reminds us of the artist’s education as an architect. appropriates of the gallery space and mutates it into a body furrowed with veins: the veins of life and of time, an announcement, that will transport us through landscapes of different horizons, in a promenade which is life itself, into the lower level of the gallery,where the second part of the show is revealed.
© Sabrina Amrani gallery
The second part of Les saisons de mon coeur will surprise those who know Andrianomearisoa’s practice. Just like in our own lives we have to break things and put ourselves out of our comfort zones to progress, the artist is exploring what happens in the space between l’aller et le retour. In the basement of the gallery Andrianomearisoa deploys with a new found language, the real seasons of his heart, the different periods of his life, reflections of personal times, becoming artwork through a new medium in the artist’s practice: the embrodery. The temporality of the embroderies allow for deep reflection during production, and connect with the metaphor of the seasons, while representing obsession and passion, in cue with Art Brut and artoutsider Jules Leclerq, who after having been hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital, began collecting threads and pieces of cloth during his working hours in the laundry, to later compose complex and baroque embroideries in the insulation of his cell.
The fifty embroderies that compose the second part of Les saisons de mon coeur tell a story where time is treated like an everchanging line, like landscapes, a breathtaking sunset, the waves in the ocean or the snow on the mountain. But the surprise comes with the lively colors used to create these embroderies, which is a novelty in Andrianomearisoa’s practice. Very much like Allighiero e Boetti with his azzaris and mappas, Joël designed these works but handed over the process of selecting and combining the colors of the found threads to the embroiderers in his studio in Madagascar, forming an accidental aesthetic for each work.
Andrianomearisoa’s Les saisons de mon coeur is a depiction of the different beats of our hearts, a rendering of the writing of our own lifes, that calls upon being more felt than understood. He is telling a different story about his new life and work, the new materials he is using, in a new life found: the dead tree of his new life.
LE LA TOUR DU MONDE
GALERIES LAFAYETTE . PARIS . FRANCE
2017
Hosted by the Galeries Lafayette department store for Africa Now, Joël Andrianomearisoa presents a poetic whirlwind under the emporium’s dome.
Galeries Lafayette welcomes its customers to an impressive showcase, plunging them into an irrational, enchanting scene that provides a unique experience. The brand invites artists and creators to present original works in its store and under its dome to enhance and transform its architectural heritage.
The ‘world tower’ is made up of flags, accounts and words from Africa. But they are from a living, daring Africa, free of imagery. The project is structured as a poetic playground that encourages visitors to lose themselves in it.
SENTIMENTAL PRODUCTS
MUSÉE LES ABATTOIRS X GALERIES LAFAYETTE . TOULOUSE . FRANCE
2017
Curator : Annabelle Ténèze
Joël Andrianomearisoa has created a Sentimental Gift Shop for the Contemporary Floor, 40 years after the Sentimental Museum and Absurd Boutique that Daniel Spoerri planned for the opening of the Centre Pompidou. In an intimist manner, Andrianomearisoa also invites us to follow him through the different areas of the museum, from the restaurant to the bookshop via the courtyards and even the city streets, bringing meaning and words to the forgotten space of Les Abattoirs. He guides us down a string of sentimental paths, leaving traces of his passing here and there with texts displayed on the walls, love letters slipped into books… In the media library, his ‘Sentimental Library’ explores the nature of the place, in time with games of love and chance.
Planned as a general project, the ‘Sentimental Products by Joël Andrianomearisoa’ are developed throughout the exhibition and its accompanying events (posters, social media, Sentimental Party, etc.). They continue until the dispersion of the ‘Sentimental Boutique’ on the last days of the exhibition, because “while the items are for sale, feelings are free.”
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
LA MAISON SENTIMENTALE
BIENNALE DE DAKAR . DAKAR . SENEGAL
2016
Curator : Simon Njami
Increasingly, the glue of time slows the turning pages of a history with a small ‘h’, ranging from contemporary African art to contemporary African expressions. Paternal instinct fades and returns as filial instinct. Today, we are not the fathers of Revue Noire, but its children, so much has a span of time we thought eternal closed in around that venture of another way of knowing and discovering. Ultimately, with an unsuspected effect: lineage. The future?
The moulds of personal ambitions have replaced our plethora of collective ambitions. Yet without reducing the fertility of time, of each time. Sterility is still the persistent prerogative of our society, of those who think they can understand and control it by remaining at a distance and observing what can no longer be and even less will be. Attempting to put into words concepts that refuse to be confined to them. For the world of forms is genuinely the sphere of concepts that cannot be trapped in the equation of words without literature.
Here in Dakar for the biennale that has been so dear – even essential – to us since its creation, our concrete relationship is reaffirmed by Joël Andrianomearisoa. He has gathered the components he needed to build his ‘Sentimental House’ from both his personal world and the great library of partial or entire illustrations from Revue Noire,
Fragments, materials, words lost and found, a new music of forms in thousands of full and empty, small and vast pages accompany us through this long building transformed into a gallery. It is not a Hall of Mirrors reflecting our own image, but a promenade where we are plunged wholly into the depths of the mystery.
Jean-Loup Pivin
DE PROFUNDIS
SABRINA AMRANI GALLERY . MADRID . SPAIN
2015
Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery presents De Profundis, the first exhibition at the gallery of Malagasy artist Jöel Andrianomearisoa, leading the viewer almost blindly through a journey from light to darkness; from the primeval dawn of life to mysterious indescribable loss.
In this new exhibition, Andrianomearisoa continues his earlier engagement with the realities of love, their crude manifestations of borderless desire bound up with the most abysmal faces of the world: violence, domination, longing, cruelty, effacement. De Profundis, taking cue from Oscar Wilde’s eponymous prison letter (1897), is not an approximation to but an affirmation of the sinister power of love, its élan vital.
© Sabrina Amrani
ALMOST HERE
ALMOST THERE
ALMOST HOME
MARIANE IBRAHIM GALLERY . CHICAGO . UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
2023
Curator : Jérôme Sans
Like a landscape, a musical score, or a notebook on which writing drips and overturns meaning, his three textile works Geometry and tales of our desires play with an ambiguity between rigidity and liquidity, presence and absence. A series of 10 of his eponymous drawings accompany these works, like sketches, echoes of the roughly drawn, almost dancing, black lines. Terrain de tous les possible showcases his emblematic black vocabulary, while demonstrating another use of textile which focuses on cuts, folds and the suggestiveness of materiality to convey sentimental meanings. Comprised of 200 Beldi glasses and 30 ceramic plates which each hold a unique drawing by the artist, Almost Here, Almost There, Almost Home is produced in Morocco, underlining local production that blends art and craft. Combining textile, paper, glass and ceramics, all characteristic elements of the artist’s language, the works reveal a world of vibrations and ambiguities, both sensitive and poetic.
HIRAFEN
ATELIER DU CENTRE TECHNIQUE DU TAPIS ET DU TISSAGE . TUNIS . TUNISIE
2023
Curator: Ludovic Delalande
The group exhibition curated by Ludovic Delalande fosters a unique dialogue between contemporary art and Tunisian textile craftsmanship. Nineteen multidisciplinary artists were invited to draw from the fields of thread and fiber crafts to create a specific work as part of a research and production residency in the Tunisian territory.
© Nicolas Fauqué . © Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
PASSAGE TO PROMISE
GREGOR PODNAR GALLERY . VIENNA . AUSTRIA
2023
Curator : Dr. Kirstin zu Hohenlohe
The exhibition “Passage to Promise” shows four different artistic positions from southern Africa: Usha Seejarim, Thania Petersens, Joël Andrianomearisoa, and Jared Ginsburg. The exhibition borrows its title from a work by Usha Seejarim and creatively references Homi Bhabha‘s post-colonial concept, The Third Space. In his book “The Location of Culture”, the social theorist argues that cultural identities are neither fixed nor essential, but are always constructed through processes of negotiation and interaction. The Third Space is an “in between” space of cultural hybridity that arises when different cultures come into contact. It is a space of ambiguity, where dominant and marginalized cultures intersect, creating new meanings and identities. A space that challenges and destabilizes established categories, opening up new and transformative possibilities.
Joël Andrianomearisoa’s work is always dealing with the idea of duality, between light and darkness, passion and fragility and the space between us, creating Labyrinths of Passion. He explores concepts of time and physicality in a fine, inside-out approach. Activating the latent, emotional power of the material world, he transcends the boundaries of video, fashion, architecture, sculpture, installation and photography. Black plays a prominent role in his textile works, which hover seductively between ephemeral and permanent. These works are partly sculptural, partly left to chance and to the randomness of the material.
DECAY : AN ODE TO THE IMPERMANENT
BURO STEDELIJK . CENTRAL SPACE . AMSTERDAM . THE NETHERLANDS
2023
Curator : Azu Nwagbogu and Rita Ouédrago
Falling, crumbling, rotting and decomposing so as to grow. What are the ethics we bring to concepts of preservation and decay? We nourish and flourish through embracing the discomfort of decay. Decay as the fruitful ground upon which we stand. The ongoing process of decay, of rebuilding and blossoming. Matter changes, time changes. We embrace the discomfort of the unknown and the experiment, and observe what grows. Death not as the end but rather as the precursor of life. Through this notion of decay, we want to reimagine and reorient the institution. Decay in this respect could provoke discomfort, but it is precisely this feeling of discomfort that we wish to encourage people to become more comfortable with.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
“why decay ?
A state or
A process of decomposition to a statement of hope or desire
From the darker side of our sentiments there will be a new beautiful melody
From destruction we can a built a new emotions.
From tragedy there will be certain kind of perfection.
À partir d’une perte il y a toujours des retrouvailles
Inside absence there is always a presence
To confirm all of those declamations perfume is the medium.
Perfume comes from the process of decomposition
And from this decay we can create new fantasies.
Rano maso rano masina rano manitra.
Process
10 paintings
61 days
61 fragrances
1 space
At the beginning each painting will be almost virgin. Black lines on the new playground.
Everyday each painting will be sprayed with one perfume chosen from the library of fragrances.
The idea is to create from the decomposition of the perfume and the painting a new visual aspect of hopes and desires.
The audience will deal with the evolution of all the installation and
Again from dirt we can create beauty and from decay we can build peace. ”
Joël Andrianomearisoa
FÊTONS LE PRINTEMPS
SAINT-VINCENT-DE-PAUL . PARIS . FRANCE
2023
A monumental artwork QUAND SOUDAIN LA MÉLANCOLIE DU PRINTEMPS RÉVEILLE LE TERRAIN DE NOS CŒURS by the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa, specially conceived for the event, exhibited throughout the weekend as part of the second edition of the festival “Fêtons le Printemps”.
CHRISTIAN DIOR : DESIGNER OF DREAMS
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART . TOKYO . JAPAN
2023
Curator : Florence Müller
Echoing this presentation (Dior Coloroma), a work by the Malagasy artist Joël Andrianomearisoa is also featured, made of 1,000 Dior scarves, which creates a poetic landscape using textile and colour as a universal language.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
PERIPHERAL SUN
VIN VIN GALLERY . VIENNA . AUSTRIA
2022
Curator : Kami Gahiga
The exhibition features the artworks of four artists: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Kapwani Kiwanga, Marin Majic and Maja Ruznic. The selected artists hail from the Eastern Coasts of Africa and the Balkan peninsula, yet each one has a distinctive approach in relation to aspects of nationalism and holds no central attachment to one specific identity or country. The exhibition explores how the cartesian and symbolic meaning of borders erode with displacement and migration. Themes of longing, nostalgia, the in-between and melancholy manifest in each of the artists’ works through a multiplicity of media: painting, installation, drawing, and collage.
Peripheral Sun initiates a debate about whose compass is acknowledged when thinking about the East and recognizes the different poles of influence that exist today.
The layout of the exhibition design leads the viewer to accustome to alternative vantage points without relying on a specific linear route, thus creating an open network of exchange with no set trajectory.
© Vin Vin Gallery
The elegant precision and simplicity found across Andrianomearisoa’s œuvre is conveyed in his three-dimensional structure Maison Imaginaire, which echoes the artist’s training as an architect through his engagement with space and environment.
Maison Imaginaire (2021) is a model of Andrianomearisoa’s monumental metallic sculpture that the artist was commissioned to realise in Aigues-Mortes, France. His structure elegantly floated between two of Aigues-Mortes’ historic towers. The city’s fortified walls and port were built in the 13th century by King Louis IX to establish a trade route to the East, and witnessed the departure of the seventh and eighth Western crusades.
Andrianomearisoa’s Maison Imaginaire evokes the paradox of human desires: to root itself through built structures while simultaneously desiring to escape, to break walls and barriers. Robust at first glance given its steel composition it is simultaneously fragile, ambiguous, and open-ended.
Étoffe des Songes (2016) is a black and white diptych that reflects the artist’s fascination for textiles’ malleable qualities which he declines through the layering of various shades of black and white. Madagascar is home to some of the finest silk and cloth production centers. The diptych equally demonstrates Andrianomearisoa’s investigation of contrasting elements and duality. On a smaller physical scale but with equal resonance are his drawings Soratra (2022), which fuse the concerns of his past projects and his installation I Have Forgotten the Night he presented at the Venice Biennale. It comprises a series of 8-diptychs depicting texts and poems written in Malagasy, French and English, realized specifically for Peripheral Sun. Andrianomearisoa’s welding of contrasts capture the balanced interplay of opposite elements.
Kami Gahiga
UBUNTU, A LUCID DREAM
PALAIS DE TOKYO . PARIS . FRANCE
2021
Curator : Marie-Ann Yemsi
This exhibition invites us to enter Ubuntu, an as yet undiscovered space within our imagination and our bodies of knowledge. This term, which belongs to the Bantu languages of South Africa, evokes notions of humanity, collectivity and hospitality. Though difficult to translate into Western languages, it can be glossed as follows: “I am because we are.” The call for a “humanity in reciprocity” that is embedded within Ubuntu thinking constitutes an essential but widely misunderstood notion of African philosophy. In both its philosophical and spiritual dimensions, Ubuntu can be considered as one of the few characteristics of African societies to have survived the six hundred years of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, phenomena that have otherwise destabilized the continent’s societies and undermined traditional undermined traditional frameworks of knowledge transmission. Found in numerous African languages and cultures, Ubuntu thought persists in the conception of the place of the individual within the community, as well as in the links between different peoples. It structures a conscience and a vision of the world based on interdependence of relation .
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
Ubuntu was also a vital notion for the ideas of the liberation movements and the post-colonial experiments that proliferated across Africa in the 1960s, fueling hopes for an African socialism or a political Pan-Africanism.
It sprang from the literary and poetic production of the content and of its diasporas, from authors such as Aimé Césaire Vumbi-Yoka Mudimbé, Edouard Glissant, Alain Mabanckou, Yanick Lahens and Léonora Miano – to name only a few francophone writers amongst many others. Musicians Fela Kuti and Mariam Makeba were also legendary spokespersons of this philosophy of unity through encounter. Because it symbolizes the bonds forged between all people, Ubuntu was used and largely popularized by Nelson Mandela to foster a vision of an ideal society that could be opposed to the segregation of the apartheid era in South Africa, and later to promote national reconciliation.
Contemporary realities unfortunately confront us with the defeat, on many fronts, of the spirit of Ubuntu, between political failings, deadly conflicts, and multiple forms of violence that target women and LGBTQI+ people in particular. And yet this philosophy is actually being reinvested by intellectuals, activists and producers in all fields of contemporary creation through new dynamics where various lines of thought and different imaginaries are being reassembled accross all continents. In a world that is more uncertain than ever, at loss of meaning, riven by sectarianism and violence, this philosophy is no more an abstract ideal than it was in the 1960s. Ubuntu and its dual question “making humanity together and together inhabiting the earth”, to quote philosopher Souleyman Bachir Diagne, emerges once again at the heart of
social, political, economic, cultural and ecological demands and debates.
This exhibition embraces these dynamics for the recomposition of the world poepled with lucid dreams, by bringing together artists whose works enter into resonance with Ubuntu philosophy and who seek to approach this body of thought around action and relations as a resource, as a space of intervention, as a fiction or as a mediation of the real world.
Imagined as a polyphonic space, the exhibition allows for artists to weave subtle ties between form and ideas, drawing on multiple subjects, perspectives and positions. The call for a “disenclosure of the world and humanity’s ascent” opens fixed and reductive conceptions of identity up to new critiques as well as to a deconstruction of univocal historical narratives and the western concept of modernity, attesting to the desire of artists to represent spaces of ideological rupture. By shedding light upon some of the most urgent questions of our age, such as unequal distribution of wealth and power, migration and border crises, the colonization of land and bodies, situations of oppression and the transformation of our relationship to nature – they contribute to an emancipation process whilst at the same time calling forth a spirit of resistance.
This exhibition seeks to bring together artists to share critical points of view and perspectives. These creators bring to their work all of the cultures that they inhabit and draw on experiences – often dual, at times painful – of migration transfer. The exhibition seeks to bypass such geographic enclosures and consider one space alone: that of the reflections and ideas proposed by the artists through subjective narratives and works that have the potential to transform our imaginaries and contribute to a new form of understanding of the world.
The exhibition aims to be “Ubuntu” in that it looks to transform artistic creation into a shared expression through the possibility of an “in-common”. At the heart of the exhibition, a vast space dedicated to a project by artist Kudzanai Chiurai opens further dimensions of exchange, discovery, and knowledge production, be they discursive, performative or musical, which are constructed on a shared stage of collective engagement.
SIGNS OF TIMES
APALAZZO GALLERY . BRESCIA . ITALY
2021
Curator : Jérôme Sans
Recent events that plunged the world into a state of global uncertainty have proven that there is definitely no such thing as a universal truth. Our societal model, which seemed to be unanimously accepted, turns out to be a fragile chessboard that can be shaken at any moment. If, after the pandemic crisis, the world appears to have returned to its usual course and former appearance, the core of everyone’s thinking has inevitably changed; signs have shifted too. It is no longer the individual who constructs his or her environment but the environment that defines us as human beings.
© Melania Dalle Grave . DSL Studio © Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
The exhibition Signs of The Times intends to put into perspective the territory of these plural questionings. How to decipher and appropriate from now on the new signs emitted by our environment under this uncertain horizon? As the collision between our civilization and the limits imposed by nature becomes more and more visible, how can we reconcile the lightness of the simple pleasures of the present moment with the global consciousness of our time?
By demonstrating critical thinking, the artists gathered in this exhibition address these existential, political, societal questions that drive our experience of the world today with radical imagination. Under the sign of the mirage but also of the semantics and the power of reproduction to infinity, the exhibition proposes multiple universes flirting in a relaxed way with the anguish of an uncertain future. Beyond their immediate expressive power, the works tackle in an underlying way some of our most pressing current issues: global warming, the rewriting of history, the challenges of the younger generation in the face of a consumerist society, the injunction to produce value, the flood of information messages, and unbridled individualism… If it is not a question here of giving solutions or answers to these problems, the works approach in a frontal way this mutation of signs currently taking place. And, in our world of images, they are, in fact, an acting force.
CHRISTIAN DIOR, DESIGNER OF DREAMS
M7 . DOHA . QATAR
2021
Curator : Olivier Gabet
For the first time in the Middle East, the House of Dior unveils a retrospective dedicated to its unique heritage.
Following its success at the musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris and several prestigious museums around the world, from London to New York, the M7 in Doha presents the exhibition Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams from November 6th to March 31st 2022, marking a first for the House of Dior in the Middle East region. Featuring a new scenographic narrative, this newly reinvented retrospective curated by Olivier Gabet – Director of the musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris – celebrates more than seventy years of creative passion, punctuated by marvellous discoveries, from the iconic address 30 Avenue Montaigne to the sumptuousness of Versailles and enchanted gardens.
© Thomas Chené . © Nelson Garrido
By turns, the exhibition features haute couture designs past and present, designed by Christian Dior and the Artistic Directors who succeeded him – Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and Maria Grazia Chiuri – as well as a selection of works and decorative objects from the collections of the musée des Arts décoratifs. Perpetuating the visionary spirit of Christian Dior, a number of House icons will also be on display, including versions of the Lady Dior bag reinterpreted for the Dior Lady Art project, singular reflections of the House’s history.
THE BLACK ERA
PRIMO MARELLA GALLERY . MILAN . ITALY
2021
This monumental exhibition is a dialogue between five artists, some Africans and some Afro-Americans, focused on the use of blackness as an allusion to an anticipatory artistic model able to destroy the patterns. Through the extremism in their artistic practices, subvert the system and open new directions for the future of art. For Joël Andrianomearisoa the colors take on a symbolic value (“white is presence, black is mystery”), the shades of black are the expression of a polyphony that far from being minimalist, it conveys emotions, an aesthetic pleasure, a sense of fragility and mystery.
“J’ai oublié la nuit dans l’attente du 7e jour qui nous réunira le temps d’une rencontre ou pour toujours … baiser blanc pour les désirs noirs” . Joël Andrianomearisoa
© Greta Belintende
VOYAGES IMMOBILES . LE GRAND TOUR . DIPTYQUE
POSTE DU LOUVRE . PARIS . FRANCE
2021
Curator : Jérôme Sans
To mark its 60th birthday, Diptyque presents its first art exhibition in Paris. “Voyages immobiles . Le Grand Tour” is a journey through five stopovers that inspired the brand’s founders. Nine multidisciplinary artists of international renown revisit France, Italy, Greece, Japan and Lebanon in works created exclusively for the exhibition.
Joël Andrianomearisoa’s proposal takes the form a silk paper installation part of the Labyrinth of passions series named Time after time.
© Florian Kleinefenn
SOCLE DU MONDE BIENNALE
HEART MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART . HERNING . DENMARK
2021
Curators : Olivier Varenne . Jean-Hubert Martin . Daniel Birnbaum and Maria Finders
Love is nothing without feeling, and feeling is even less without love – this is the kind of thinking underpinning how Andrianomearisoa plays with the complex emotional experience reflected in his works. Warmth and earnestness meet a fragile cold, an isolated world of gloom and insecurity that also invites tenderness and wonder. Andrianomearisoa’s art contains echoes of geographical and spatial liberation and captivity; here, spatial constraints also allow scope for symbolic freedom enacted by the positions taken by the works and the viewer. Sharp edges and bright, even harsh light create shadows and reflections evocative of urban, harsh metropolitan architecture, while soft materials and living forms are suggestive of life, emotions, and freedom – a sensuous experience of the city setting and the living, breathing life found within.
REVUE NOIRE . A HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART 2021
MUSÉE LES ABATTOIRS . TOULOUSE . FRANCE
2021
Curators : Jean Loup Pivin . Pascal Martin Saint Leon and Annabelle Ténèze
In the 1990s, Revue Noire was much more than a publication. It revealed dynamic culture in Africa. The exhibition looks back on that new way of writing about and introducing the continent’s different forms of contemporary creation. It is accompanied by a selection of artworks revolving around different historical facets of African photography leading up to contemporary images. It was nearly thirty years ago, the release of the first issue of Revue Noire founded by Jean Loup Pivin, Simon Njami, Pascal Martin Saint-Léon and Bruno Tilliette.
Its intention was to illustrate the African continent’s modernity and creativity. Mainly personally funded, for nearly 10 years – from 1991 to 2000 – the 35 issues of the quarterly revealed an artistic representation unfamiliar in the West and covering forms of expression that ranged from fashion to plastic arts, literature, films, photography, design and dance.
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
“Until the start of the 1990s, Western international journalists portrayed Africa as a virgin, wild, impoverished continent, focusing on spectacular ethnology or horrified reporting on poverty and wars. African photography – at least in terms of its incompatibility with what Westerners expected to see – was little-known. But today, many artists from Africa are seen as simply artists rather than ‘African artists’.
While Revue Noire was not alone in furthering this evolution, it greatly contributed to the recognition of African creators – not only by others, but also by themselves.
Twenty years later, this exhibition looks back at that ten-year period when the magazine toured Africa and most of its related continents, devoting issues to Senegal and Benin, but also the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean. Today, the magazine is part of the history of the recognition of African art and its working methods. In other words, it was a magazine that interpreted the contemporary creation of an entire continent. And Revue Noire is still continuing its work today by publishing art books.
Annabelle Ténèze . Director of Les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie
CE QUI RESTE ET CE QUI S’OUBLIE
MUSÉE DE L’HISTOIRE DE L’IMMIGRATION . PARIS . FRANCE
2021
Curators : Meriem Berrada and Isabelle Renard
Fruit of a partnership between the Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Marrakech and the Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris, the exhibition Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste explores the idea of dissemination in the works of eighteen artists from the African continent and its diasporas.Today, as communication, rolling news and social media – but also individualism – reign supreme, what can we say about dissemination? What of that action whose purpose is to pass on to a new generation memories, compendia of personal recollections and slices of life gleaned here and there?
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
Above and beyond traditions, rituals and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and skills, what methods of linguistic, political, spiritual and social dissemination shape our world view and construct our identity?
With its personal accounts that provide a broad historical perspective, the exhibition Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste combines heritages and circulations, and examines issues of frontiers and migrations, bonds between generations, and history and memory on either side of the Mediterranean and over the African continent
Paintings, weaves, sculptures, videos, installations and performances – some of them commissioned works produced by artists representative of the vitality of African art – are devoted as much to exchanges as to break-ups and that which has been forgotten, omitted or made invisible.
Counter to the colourful representations of a supposed African artistic production, the intention of Ce qui s’oublie et ce qui reste, as it alternates between continuity and points of separation, is to debunk the clichés of a visual identity related to the continent. Far from homogenous, the visual accounts of the artists reveal a plethora of specificities, facets and complexities.
“to the memory of all
of nostalgia
of history
to the diversity
of the present
in memory of all
of an account
of an era
to the multiple
horizons
to the memory of all
of forgotten
emotions
to certainty
to an excellent future” – Joël Andrianomearisoa
THE LABYRINTH OF PASSIONS . LOEWE CRAFT PRIZE
MUSÉE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS . PARIS . FRANCE
2020
The Loewe Foundation Craft Prize seeks to acknowledge and support international artisans of any age or gender who demonstrate an exceptional ability to create objects of superior aesthetic value. By identifying work that reinterprets existing knowledge to make it relevant today while reflecting its maker’s personal language and distinct hand, the Loewe Foundation aims to highlight the continuing contribution of craft to the culture of our time.
Inspired by themes of love and loss present in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, this large-scale wall sculpture of the artist Joël Andrianomearisoa appears almost phantasmal. Strips of black silk paper, laboriously adhered edge-wise, appear to dance and reflect light despite their darkness.
Here is the link to the digital exhibition.
ALMOST HOME
GALERIE RX . PARIS . FRANCE
2019
Curator : Joël Andrianomearisoa
© Studio Joël Andrianomearisoa
RACING THE GALAXY
ASTANA ART SHOW . KAZAKHSTAN
2019
Curators : Jérôme Sans and Dina Baitassova
Racing the Galaxy brings together 20 artists from 15 countries, enriching each other and creating a new intercultural dialogue. The exhibition deals with the gradual dissolution of dichotomies between East and West, in the era of global communication and the confrontation and melting of cultures, referencing the idea that artistic forms travel, mingle and enrich each other, from one continent to another. Built around the concepts of instability, change and mutation, Racing the Galaxy gathers experiences, territories, continents and people. It reveals the ambivalence of migrating artists and motionless travellers, always taken between different states, different positions.
Using silk paper or lamba, a ubiquitous fabric in Madagascar for garments and sometimes to shroud the dead, the artist’s iconic series The labyrinth of Passions is a metaphor for fragility as an essential life force. His superim-position of diverse silk papers in the space also provides architectural solidity to the work. Black becomes an ‘emotional fabric’, with its limitless nuances. Andrianomearisoa insist on intimacy and fragility in mapping out thoughts, emotions, and social realities in environments that are both flattering and misleading. His materials are raw but also exquisitely delicate, almost to the point of breaking in the chaos of experience.
A BEAST, A GOD AND A LINE
KUNSTHALL TRONDHEIM . TRONDHEIM . NORWAY . 2019
DHAKA ART SUMMIT . BANGLADESH . 2018
MUSEUM OF MORDERN ART . WARSAW . POLAND . 2018
Curator : Cosmin Costinas
A beast, a god, and a line question how we should negotiate common ground in the context of the overall political and ideological fragmentation discussed above. How can positions that claim disparate and conflicting genealogies sit together in a shared exhibition space? One tenuous leading line that weaves diverse intersecting layers and different aspects of this exhibition are textiles. A material and language common to different cultural spaces, textiles also have a firmly routed history in art, being possible sites for parallel processes of historiography. Moreover, textiles hold a different position in negotiating relationships with places and contexts, in ways that the individual agency of artists escapes.
The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Hong Kong. It was on view at Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, as well as at The Secretariat (Pyinsa Rasa/TS1), Yangon throughout 2018, and previously at Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway in 2019.
© Aage A. Mikalsen . Kunsthall Trondheim © Daniel Chrobak
HELLO WORLD
HAMBURGUER BAHNHOF . BERLIN . GERMANY
2018
Curators : Udo Kittelmann with Sven Beckstette, Daniela Bystron, Jenny Dirksen, Anna-Catharina Gebbers, Gabriele Knapstein, Melanie Roumiguière and Nina Schallenberg for the Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, with contributions from guest curators Zdenka Badovinac, Eugen Blume, Clémentine Deliss, Natasha Ginwala and Azu Nwagbogu.
“Hello World. Revising a Collection” is a critical inquiry into the collection of the Nationalgalerie and its predominantly Western focus: What could the collection look like today? […] Instead of constructing a linear development of history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, works of the collection provide points of departure for thirteen narratives, which range from the retracing of vestiges of history to the associative intertwinement of thought lines and pictorial worlds.
Although there have been numerous connections between artists from different African countries and Germany as well as within the German art scene, the National- galerie’s collection contains hardly any works by modern or contemporary artists which are related to countries or thematics of the African continent. This exhibition chapter cannot therefore be based on the holdings of the Nationalgalerie. Instead it addresses an issue long neglected by the German public, yet an urgent concern which nonetheless artists have never lost sight of: the violent history of German and European colonialism, through which the histories on both continents are inti- mately bound together.
Its consequences continue to shape the present. Four con- temporary artists in critically re ecting on their own positions reveal the colonial mentalities which are still deeply rooted in today’s minds and o er alternative strat- egies of empowerment (…) By referring to photographs from the colonial past, Joël Andrianomearisoa lays bare the so power but never- theless reckless structure behind the aim to “civilise” one’s counterpart.
Madagascar takes part in the 58th edition of La Biennale di Venezia International Exhibition with its own pavilion for the first time in its history. Although several Western countries have attended it for more than a century, only during the last ten years have some African pavilions begun to appear, for instance, South Africa and Côte d’Ivoire.
Joël Andrianomearisoa was chosen to represent his country alongside curators Rina Ralay Ranaivo and Emmanuel Daydé, due to the invention and maturity of his work, his international reputation as well as the unconditional support of his professional network.
This first participation in La Biennale di Venezia is a historic event for Madagascar. It is a sign of dynamism and modernity for the Malagasy nation. It reflects a positive image of the country at national and international levels, despite the all too frequent predominance of either exotic or miserable images associated with it. It is a message of hope and willingness to put the creative forces of Madagascar in the mainstream of the world.
The Madagascar Pavilion, a project of Madagascar’s Ministry of Culture, will be fully financed by national and international private funds.
I HAVE FORGOTTEN THE NIGHT
“And we have more beautiful nights than your days” Jean Racine.
Giving material expression to a journey translated from the night and viewed through the prism of torn papers of love and death, Joël Andrianomearisoa deploys the intangible essence of the invisible, turning around a world of otherness as an iron sun fades into the azure of night; as dark light no longer ushers in the day. In love “with the different grounds of three contrasting orchards: cold Europe, India with its pink and blue skies and Africa, a clear, deep spring” (Jean Joseph Rabearivelo), Andrianomearisoa endlessly unites their fundamental, component opposites to create elegant, abstract, melancholic forms woven from natural materials devoured by shadow and light.
Child of the nights of “Iarivo the dead” (Antananarivo) and un año de amor on the streets of Madrid, a lone dreaming nomad straying from the bars and restaurants of Paris to the sleeping shores of the Bosphorus or the infinite horizons of Cotonou, the artist without frontiers brings a boundless nostalgia to the modernity of the square, breathing the sentimentality of material things.
Charged with creating the Venice Biennale’s first Madagascar pavilion, Joël Andrianomearisoa does not pay tribute to a country, but to the majesty of beyond black and its mournful wanderings – folding, unfolding, revealing outlines, singing and laughing as melancholy comes. “The geometry of the angle is a point of no return that embraces the present,” he assures us.
Thinking of his distant land, the artist deconstructs the Palace of Ilafy, the first royal residence on the twelfth sacred hill of Imerina, separating the heavy planks of black rosewood to build them into twelve organic canopies that tumble in a dark cascade of bags, ropes and ashes. From the lost memory of that royal hut springs a tomb for half a million soldiers at Ecbatana, an allegorical Platonic cave, a labyrinth of passions, a theatre of affections… Gutted blades falling from the sky in waves of soot and rain throw up the wan, grey mists of the dying Creuse or the notched, gullied walls of Tritriva’s lovers’ lake. Turning the world above to the world below.
Rina Ralay-Ranaivo and Emmanuel Daydé
Images : © Juan Cruz Ibañez
Joël Andrianomearisoa . Artist
Rina Ralay-Ranaivo . Curator
Emmanuel Daydé . Curator
Production : Kantoko & Revue associations
Jean-Loup Pivin . Revue noire . General coordination
Tsiory Razafinorovelo . Coordination and sponsorship
Elisabeth Vauprès . Communication
Catherine Philippot . Communication and press
Alexandre Gourçon . Graphic design and social medias
Pascal Martin Saint Leon . Coordination catalogue
Massimo Barbierato . Production
Patrice Sour . Production
Fernand Bretillot . Production
Rila Rasoavelomanana . Production
Ihoby Rabarijohn . Public relations Madagascar
Bodo Rabeharisoa . Organisation
Tahiry Razanadraibe . Administration
Sponsors and partners
Ministry of Communication and Culture (MCC)
Mrs Lalatiana Andriatongarivo Rakotondrazafy
Rubis mécénat cultural fund
Groupe Filatex . Fond Yavarhoussen
Fonds de dotation Thibault Poutrel
With the support of
Mrs Nathalie Aureglia
La Fondation Zinsou
Musée Les Abattoirs . Frac Occitanie Toulouse
Fondation H
Sabrina Amrani Gallery
Primo Marella Gallery
Galerie RX
Air Madagascar
AXIAN
La chocolaterie Robert
VIMA Vision Madagascar
Pavilion Bosio ESAP Monaco
Pixel Farm
Madagascar Pavilion Friends
Nathalie Rosticher . Founder
Frédéric de Goldschmidt . Founder
Timothée Ethis de Corny . Organisation
Rita Rovelli Caltagirone, Taloumis Family, Anne and Karim Barday, Galila Barzilai-Hollander, Valérie Bach, Céline Melon, Nathalie Guiot, Katia de Radigues, Mathieu Paris and Razid Kalfane, Virginie Puertolas-Syn, Caroline Smulders, Alejandro Lazaro Collado, Brigitte Razaka and Michele Franchi, Maureen Ayité, Aude de Vaucresson, Annick and Thierry Rajoana, Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir, Pascale Martine Tayou, Christian Sanna, Isabelle Bourne, Maria and Jorge Fernadez Vidal, Jean-Philippe Vernes, Timothée Ethis de Corny