Master Myriam Mihindou seeks for a transformative experience in her studio
“Since 1993, Myriam Mihindou has been producing works that correspond to what she calls, ‘the therapeutic dimension of reason’. Her works seek to channel, through the lens of transformative experience, the healing processes and rituals that accompany a transition from one state to another.” (source: 1-54.com)
Myriam Mihindou. Image by Yaye Marieba
Myriam Mihindou, born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon, to a Gabonese father and a French mother, lives and works in Paris. After studying architecture, she enrolled in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux. Though she started working with sculpture and metal, the discovery of Land Art, Joseph Beuys, and Ana Mendieta, led her artistic exploration to nature through ritualized actions. Myriam Mihindou works with photography as well as performance, video, drawing and sculpture. Highly autobiographical, her creative process explores memory, identity, and the social, political and sexual body.
Myriam Mihindou – Studio 7 July – 15 July 2018 at Design Hub Kampala
Myriam selected the following Apprentices to participate in her Studio:
Andrew Arim (Uganda)
Arim Andrew is one a Ugandan artists who specialises in oil and acrylic painting primarily inspired by wildlife conservation and protection. Born in Rukungiri, he graduated with a degree in Social Science from the University of Kampala, after which he took to painting and has since exhibited locally and internationally. His work is primarily based on animals and nature, which he brings to life using great technique and style. His work reflects the fragility of our natural world and the beauty that we are all responsible to preserve. More recently, after participating in an drawing workshop and exhibition at Afriart on 7th, he experimented with a more surrealistic style and social-political subject matter.
Screen Capture of the film A l’ouest
Violaine Le Fur (France / Cameroon)
Violaine Le Fur was born November 23, 1989 of a Breton mother and a Cameroonian father in Paris.
She grew up in Vaires sur Marne. Her father is a designer and her mother took her from an early age to see important exhibitions of modern paintings which inspired her and influence her choices. Encouraged in her expression as a child and teenager, she practiced dance, flamenco, capoeira, piano… She studied Art History and Archaeology at the Institute Michelet. After that, she began an artistic training at the Villa Arson, higher national school of art in Nice, and later at La Cambre Higher National School of Arts in Brussels, photography section. After her studies and experimenting with several styles, she had the feeling that she developed belief systems that do not belong to her. In 2017, she decided to focus her work on Cameroon.
Being a multidisciplinary artist, she is looking for the tension between symbolism and intimacy in various spaces. She is currently directing an autobiographical documentary where she shares the experience of the road that leads to a place where her ancestors are buried in the bush west of Bamiléké, and her initiation traditional dialogue with the elders and ancestors. The image of the film resulted in another art form through a new technique, “dialog plastique”: the screenshot for printing on canvas through manual deletion and the use of solvents.
Her adventure through the theme of ownership of world symbolism revives an aesthetic and philosophical questioning to it: “Do our ideas and actions belong to us?”
Lais Catalano Aranha,This Side Up, frames
Laís Catalano Aranha (Brazil)
Laís Catalano Aranha is an emerging artist working primarily on lens-based mediums such as photography, video and multimedia art. Her mains research is directed to the exchange of artistic languages and how they can influence one another to create interdisciplinary works. Dance, music and performance have great influence on her creative process. Laís is a member of Coletivo Baillistas, a group of multidisciplinary artists that researches and works towards the union of performance and visual languages, temporal and timeless art. The collective uses contemporary dance, performance, photography and video to re-frame in a poetic language life in big cities, especially the city of São Paulo,Brazil. The group has been working together since 2012.
Pierre Manau, Trauma, Photo grattée (2018)
Pierre Manau (Congo)
Pierre Manau, known as Man’s, was born in 1993 in Brazzaville. After obtaining her literary baccalaureate, she studies audiovisual at TAGGAT, a school of visual arts in Dakar. From 2012 to 2013 she went back to Congo and spent a year studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Brazzaville. She took part in painting and video workshops at ATELIERS SAHM, a contemporary art center led by the greatest Haitian painter alive, Frantz Zephirin, during the Amazing-Travelers Festival. Man’s also participated in several group exhibitions at the French Institute of Congo, SAHM WORKSHOPS and the Biennale of Contemporary Art DAKAR’T.
In 2012, during the International Meeting of Contemporary Art in Brazzaville, she produces three art videos, one of which is the awarded “Our silences” film, inspired by Jean Luc Godard’s film Alphaville. This work around Our silences is part of a research process. With a very large sensitivity, her work was unanimously approved by the jury for the Goddy Leye award. She also received a special mention (Jury Prize) for her video “Like a Diamond” (2013) given the deep, aesthetic and conceptual dimension of her research. She participated in a workshop in cinematographic criticism and became a fan of writing. During the exhibition Congo-Cameroon: aesthetics shared beyond geographies, Man’s has marked her presence by her critical texts. Since 2017, she has been a recipient of the Gaestealiers Krone Aaru grant, awarded to Congolese women artists and laureate of the Blachère Foundation Prize for a two weeks artist residency at Apt in 2019. Man’s lives and studies in Paris where she writes a thesis research on Congolese cinema at the Sorbonne.