On the evocative power of blur
Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget, on view until recently at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation in Paris, upends traditional norms of photographic representation. Through the abstraction of Black bodies and the evocative power of blur, Niang navigates the boundaries between visibility and opacity, pulling viewers into a dreamlike space where identity is self-imagined, and complexity resists reduction. Drawing on the works of Fred Moten, Édouard Glissant, Tebogo George Mahashe, and others, Taous Dahmani reflects on her visit to the exhibition.
Taous Dahmani | Exhibition review | 23 Jan 2025
In recent years, as I meandered through the labyrinthine corridors of contemporary art fairs, I found myself consistently drawn to the vibrant, blurred compositions of Mame-Diarra Niang. Within the abstraction, laid the fleeting hint of portraits, only just discernible, prompting me to wonder what drove the French visual artist to craft images that deliberately resist representation. As I resumed my roving, the increasing power of the fog stayed with me: rising like an ocean within the growing tide of figuration. Haunted by the haze, I wondered about the spectacle of figuration and the capabilities of its refusal. Mame-Diarra Niang’s blurring of black bodies functions as both an interpellation and an abstention – a diffuse energy and a dilution of sight; an exhaustion of the need to render muffled in a scream conveyed as a dream. The blur operates like a frequency, the capture of a spirit, the idea of magic. ‘We are after the absolute presence of blur. Blueblackblur is our concern.’ wrote African American poet and theorist Fred Moten (Black and Blur, 2017). The blur functions like an eclipse, a shadow that alters clarity but leaves a luminous obscuration. The aesthetic strategies of Remember to Forget seem to enact a claiming of opacity.
During a grey November visit to Paris late last year, I had the opportunity to see Mame-Diarra Niang’s first institutional exhibition in France, hosted at the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation. If you missed it, its footprint can be found in a rather unique artist book, of the same name, published by MACK, and a selection of Niang’s works are also currently on display in Stevenson’s Amsterdam gallery in an exhibition titled Æther. As you stepped into the gallery, the bustling streets of Paris faded away, leaving Rue des Archives behind as you enter an exhibition space wished by Cartier-Bresson, which opened a year before his death in 2004. 20 years later, Niang’s exhibition, curated by Clément Chéroux, unfolded across three spaces: a preliminary area that introduced the origins of the project and its initial experimental renditions, followed by the main gallery, where large-scale blurred portraits dominated. Finally, you entered a third room, its walls painted black, showcasing red, green, and blue stain-shaped photographic busts: the atmospheric condition of black by way of blur. The visit is an experiential journey through the intensification of abstraction, culminating in the vivid presence of what could be described as breathing auras. As you navigated these three spaces, the tetralogy, you venture to the edge of representation, encountering the blur as both a reverberation and a shield. In Mame-Diarra Niang’s work, the surfaces of the photographic paper bear the traces of smudged ink, extending to the periphery of the print.
The visit triggers a lingering sensation, a sensory response. If the viewer’s eye struggles to see clearly – not due to an irregularly shaped cornea – the exhibition invites us to engage other senses. What is absent from the image can instead be imagined, experienced or felt. Mame-Diarra Niang resists narration, not out of a lack of interest in storytelling – the poems scattered throughout the galleries attest to this – but as a defiance of explanation. I think: given the lasting damage photography has inflicted on the depiction of Black and Brown people, it’s no wonder that the only solution is to reclaim it from any oppressive grasp or gaze. In the current global context, the spectacle of otherness is no solution. I remember: Édouard Glissant’s chapter “For Opacity” in Poetics of Relation (1990).
Since the 1980s, and more so in the 1990s, French Caribbean (“Martiniquais”) writer, poet, philosopher, and theorist Édouard Glissant articulated how for the West to understand those who is “different” to itself, it must grant the Other full transparency in order to then grant recognition of its existence. Glissant wrote that one not only has to agree ‘to the right to difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity,’ adding ‘to understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components.’
Singularity is indeed at the core of Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget project, which can also be considered as self-portraits as noted the artist: “This series feels like the abstract idea that I have of myself.” But the right to opacity is not a claim of silence, but a right to complexity against oversimplification, assumption, categorisation, ‘reduction’ to use another of Glissant’s phrase. The bright vibration that make the multi-chromatic “portraits” state, via their texture, polymorphous identities, multiple, poetic and self-imagined selves. ‘As far as my identity is concerned, I will take care of it myself. That is, I shall not allow it to become cornered in any essence,’ wrote Glissant; whose words strike a chord in the context of France’s imposition of universality and its refusal of difference, all under the banner of the French Revolution’s motto: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”.
Drawing partly on Glissant, South African researcher and artist Tebogo George Mahashe frames this process of refusal as a challenge to the colonial fetishism of sight-based knowledge. Instead, he embraces the guidance of dreams’ instruction, where their narrative remains open to interpretation. Finding the space of dreams more generative for understanding and representing the self, Tebogo George Mahashe also claims Glissant’s opacity and explained: ‘to insist on dreams and its practice as opaque texts – knowable only to the person who experienced the dream and practiced dreaming – is to refuse and reject colonialism’s insistence on seizing every detail’ (2020). The deformation of content, resulting from the blur, allows for an escape from the rigidity of the real, from the imposition of any authority. The blur is a dream that belongs only to the dreamer. One of the chapters of Mame-Diarra Niang’s project is titled “Sama Guent Guii”, which, translating from Wolof (Niang was raised across Senegal, the Ivory Coast and France), means : “this dream that I had.” Remember to Forget then evokes an introspective journey, offering a dissolute form for the design of an inner landscape.
The contours of a dream are not photographic, yet if they were to be rendered through the medium of photography, they would undoubtedly be blurry, much like the dream itself and its lingering presence throughout the rest of our day. In one of Mame-Diarra Niang’s report-poems, she states: ‘We are never the same when we wake up.’ Perhaps that’s the sensation captured on the surface of Niang’s photographs: a sfumato, a soft, gradual transition between the world of the sleepers and that of the awake. It is a hazy, smoky effect that functions both as mood and stance. As Moten once wrote. ‘B is for blurr, for the seriality of an extra r, dividing movements like a fantasy, like Theaster Monk’s mood.’♦
Mame-Diarra Niang: Remember to Forget ran at Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation until 5 January 2025.
Æther is on at Stevenson Amsterdam until 22 February 2025.
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Taous Dahmani is a London-based French, British and Algerian art historian, writer and curator. Her expertise centres around the intricate relationship between photography and politics, a theme that permeates her various projects. She is an Associate Lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. Dahmani’s curatorial work was showcased at Les Rencontres d’Arles, France, where she curated the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2022). In 2024 Dahmani curated exhibitions at Jaou Tunis, Tunisia; NŌUA, Norway; and Saatchi Gallery, London.
Images:
1-Mame-Diarra Niang, Turn #2, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
2-Mame-Diarra Niang, Continue #35, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
3-Mame-Diarra Niang, Continue #22, from the series Call Me When You Get There. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
4-Mame-Diarra Niang, Ce qui monte, from the series Léthé. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
5-Mame-Diarra Niang, Figure le moment qui précède, from the series Léthé. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
6-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #3, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
7-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #4, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
8-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #6, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
9-Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du rêve #23, from the series Sama Guent Guii. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
10-Mame-Diarra Niang, Æther. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam
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