A soul turned inside out
The combination of the smell of burning incense and the music that accompanies the exhibition, which Niang composes from an app on an iPad that sits on her lap, creates a feeling of hyper-presence that is usually difficult to achieve when viewing art within the relentless context of the white cube in contemporary galleries.
The sense that she has prepared the space for visitors offers a respite from the monthly ritual of consuming new
Iwas not prepared to meet Mame Diarra Niang. Prior to landing at her studio residency on the upper gallery of the Stevenson gallery, I had only glanced, quite quickly, at Niang’s photographic series, in particular Sahel Gris, At the Wall and Metropolis.
The drive to her temporary studio (from Rosebank to Braamfontein) somehow mimicked the meter and methodology of Metropolis, her inmotion series of buildings in Johannesburg’s inner city. In that series, Niang seems to alter the dimensions of the city’s skyscrapers, splitting their pretences towards location and reshaping them into a city refracted through the prism of time.
Looking at Metropolis while moving through the city lent a poetry to my anxiety.
Moving backwards through her oeuvre, it was easy for me to see, for example, how Origin of the Future (depicted on her website as a series of fragmented, reconstructed geological work within a noisy exhibition opening environment, often lubricated by wine, small talk and a nervous distance from the work on the walls. Here, presence is crucial, talking is big and there is a big bottle of still water from which we all drink with no glasses.
“The only thing that you are sure is you is your presence; it’s like your gospel,” she says early into our conversation, sitting cross-legged on the foam and enveloped by three wall-to-wall video projections. It’s too early to decipher meanings from the works on the stills) could be directly related to, say, At the Wall, her Dakar series playing with stillness and optical perspective. In a sense, both capture “imaginary territory constructed out of lost physical territories”.
Seeing Origin of the Future for the first time before the studio visit evoked a feeling of being trapped inside a city’s bowels, contrasting with the feeling of experiencing its temporality that occurs with Metropolis.
Whereas Metropolis transforms Johannesburg’s edifices into geometric, pyramid-like shapes, as if conjoining both its past and future, Origin of the Future seems to expand the binaries at play here, offering us a city before human existence as well as one after our time on the planet.
But no amount of cursory examination of Niang’s work could prepare me for the unhinged experience of her studio residency, Black Hole. The ease with which she transformed her in-studio residency space into a mystic’s enclave speaks to a self-awareness and an expertise in experiencing walls but the setting curtails the doubt that abstract video work can muster in one’s sensibilities.
Niang is visibly excited to have other energies in the space. This moment is the revelation of her self-imposed banishment into her own mind since she arrived in Johannesburg from Paris, where she lives, in the middle of August. The work registers like an exploration of literal and figurative self, territory, time and space. It was conceived in Dakar a year ago and produced between there and Johannesburg, but looks like nowhere in humans as cities in and of themselves — territories, if you will.
For her residency, Niang curated sounds, smells and a visual overload not meant to overwhelm but rather to foster a renewed search for reciprocal inspiration and communion with strangers.
Frustrated with lack of visibility, she nonetheless did not foreground her personal travails, turning our interaction into an engaging conversation that sought to interrogate her ethos as an expression of her actual practice rather than the practice itself.
In Since time is distance in space, which plays out over multiple channels, Niang projected several slowmotion videos in a negative filter that depicted an alternate yet familiar world.
A quarry road (supposedly in Johannesburg) is seen as a shifting, moon-like surface, patrolled by lampshade satellites and a rotating, primordial, humanoid figure. The largescreen projections looped images that were beamed off screens affixed particular — a manifestation of her preoccupation with territory.
Since time is distance in space is an altogether different notion of landscape compared with her previous photographic works At the Wall, Sahel Gris and Metropolis, which are series of photographs of nameless and sparsely populated terrestria in Africa that do not scream their location.
“I erase the name of a city in my work because it’s my territory; I make it whatever I want. It’s so complicated in general to just claim this,’’ she says, speaking of her determination not to be confined. Her audacity in de-Africanising Africa’s fetishised landscape is important in understanding what she offers to the world.
In Since time is distance in space, Niang liberates time, territory and her own body from the frame and releases them into the ether, where they are comfortably lost or perhaps searching. It is unclear. She consistently considers territory and the frame in her work as liminal concepts where freedom can be found. It’s something she attributes to growing up in different places. to prefab walls and the floor, leaving a vast black foam mat surface and perhaps a workstation where Niang had set up a tablet-controlled audio station. A lilting, post-internet vibraphone melody turned over on itself, bouncing off the walls and the souls in the space.
In a different part of the room, obscured by walling and curtains, was a projection over a Perspex screen tilted at a 45° angle that depicted “a comet transforming into a map”, as the geology-evoking Ori-