Violence silencieuse - Sous le regard de Roméo Mivekannin

How can we view colonial exhibitions without reproducing their violence? Roméo Mivekannin turns the lens back on the visitor himself, in a work that mirrors the history of human zoos and their images.

Born in 1986 in Bouaké and a descendant of the Benin king Béhanzin, Roméo Mivekannin develops a body of work that revisits European representations of Black people in painting and photography. Known for his cloth paintings blending acrylic and mud elixir, he inserts himself through self-portraiture into historical scenes to interrogate their construction and their stakes.

The artist critically analyzes ethnographic exhibitions of the 19th and 20th centuries, in which non-European people were presented as objects of curiosity. He highlights the persistence of these legacies within museums, as well as the silent violence of the photographs produced in Paris at that time.

For the exhibition at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Mivekannin creates four metal sculptures in the shape of closed aviaries, representing the Trocadéro ethnography museum, the west wing of the Palais de Chaillot, the Musée de la Porte Dorée, and the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Created in collaboration with Ivorian blacksmiths in Abidjan, these aviaries materialize an apparatus of symbolic confinement.

He also presents fourteen large canvases inspired by photographs from the museum’s collection: the first revisits a panoplied presentation at the Trocadéro, while the others reinterpret exhibitions that took place at the Champ de Mars, the Jardin d’Acclimatation, or the Folies Bergère. The original photographs will be visible through a device of one-way glass, inviting the visitor to acknowledge their own position as a viewer.