"I am exploring how I can develop a new visual language in terms of our representation. I want to show us in this conversation that humanity is trying to have about the problems of our planet and I aspire to see us participate and take the lead in the global environmental movement."
MAGNIN-A gallery is pleased to present Omar Victor Diop's solo exhibition. For the first time, the last three emblematic series of the photographer will be gathered at the gallery: Diaspora (2014), Liberty (2017) and Allegoria (2021).
In Diaspora, Omar Victor Diop embraces the art of the self-portrait. The Senegalese photographer embodies in his images eighteen figures of the African diaspora, forgotten by Western history. Mathematicians, artists, poets, or advisors, all the subjects chosen by Diop were notables in the time of the colonies and the slave trade. "The common denominator of this series is the forgetfulness into which all these personalities with remarkable careers have fallen" explains the photographer. By staging himself, Omar Victor Diop speaks of lives other than his own. By embellishing his images with objects related to soccer, he blurs the dramatic charge while propelling his historical characters into the present. He thus inscribes them in the debate on immigration and the insertion of foreigners in European societies.
For Liberty realised in 2017, Omar Victor Diop continues to highlight the African continent and its diaspora by offering a universal reading of the history of Black protest. Through a game of visual references mixing self-portraits and stagings, the artist revisits the key events of this history, certainly differentiated by time, geography and scale, but linked by the same quest, that of freedom too often impeded. Thus, the tragedy of Thiaroye, where on December 1, 1944, Senegalese infantrymen who served France during the Second World War were massacred, echoes the exactions carried out by the police and the Ku Klux Klan during the protest marches linking the cities of Selma and Montgormery in the State of Alabama in the United States in 1965. The story of Aline Sitoe Diatta, a symbol of resistance to French authority in Senegal in the 1940s, is confronted with that of Trayvon Martin, a black teenager murdered in Florida in 2012, whose death led to a major protest movement in the United States.
With Allegoria, Omar Victor Diop begins a new chapter in his work. The photographer takes up the fundamental question of the environment and its impact on the African continent. His works represent the allegory of a humanity concerned with a nature that could be no more than a memory of natural history textbooks. Man, abandoned to his painful responsibility, gathers around him this Nature reduced to a representation. "I am exploring how I can develop a new visual language in terms of our representation. I want to show us in this conversation that humanity is trying to have about the problems of our planet and I aspire to see us participate and take the lead in the global environmental movement."
