In Dakar, Senegal, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, a client of Communic'Art, presents Hosties noires, the new solo exhibition of the Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin from 2 April to 5 June, 2021. He will present 10 paintings on cloth, an installation composed of 18 Senegalese Tirailleurs and a luminous neon sculpture forming the verses of a poem.

Roméo Mivekannin delves into the archetypes of colonial imagery and is particularly interested in the postcards that French soldiers sent to their families in the metropolis, and which depicted the wives of riflemen in the tasks of daily life. Between fantasy of exoticism, colonial ideology and fascination for the Other, these images bear witness to the ambiguous relationship between the metropolis and its colonies.

Painting on an assemblage of sheets that have undergone the ritual bathing process that gives them their particular colour, Roméo Mivekannin reproduces in an act of reappropriation, the images of these black women who have become an object under the mechanical eye of the colonial camera. The space of the painting then becomes at the same time a place of dialogue and confrontation of the imaginary for the contemporary spectator.

Elsewhere, in a worked through clair-obscur, a suspended installation brings together the faces of Senegalese Tirailleurs painted on newspapers dating from 1944-1945. From one medium to another, the exhibition Hosties noires unfolds like a choral song of voices, giving a privileged place to the archive as a breeding ground for new imaginations. Pursuing his quest for meaning but also his aesthetic quest, Romeo Mivekannin here again urges us with as much subtlety as visual power to question the construction of representations of black people throughout history.