Minia Biabiany — À propos — Slash Paris

Born in 1988 in Basse-Terre (Guadeloupe), lives and works between Mexico City (Mexico) and Saint-Claude (Guadeloupe).

In her work, Minia Biabiany questions relationships to territory and places in the Caribbean and Guadeloupean contexts — their poetics, their colonial history, and their present-day existence as a dominated territory under pressure to assimilate. In her installations and videos, weaving serves as a paradigm for thinking about the structures of narrative and language. In 2016, she initiated the collective project Semillero Caribe in Mexico City and today continues her research in relation to pedagogy in the Caribbean with Doukou, a platform for experimenting through the body and through feeling concepts devised by Caribbean authors. In the installations she has designed for the Palais de Tokyo, natural, processed or manufactured materials intermingle and punctuate the space from its floor to its ceiling, at once constraining and orienting the public’s circulation and gaze by imposing a certain slowness on their bodies. In connection with the memory of slavery and the exploitation of territories and bodies, the artist opens up parallels between spaces both psychic and physical, drawing inspiration from the Creole garden, a site for producing food that is also invested with curative properties.

Her work has recently been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein, Freiburg (2021), at La Verrière, Brussels (2020) and Le Magasin des horizons, Grenoble (2020). Her work has also been presented at the CRAC Alsace (2019) and at the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018).
Her solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo forms a pendant to her forthcoming show from 8 October to 31 December 2022 at the Grand Café in Saint-Nazaire.

Text: Palais de Tokyo