Amsterdam

STEVENSON is pleased to present Æther, a solo exhibition by Mame-Diarra Niang, her fourth with the gallery. This series is the latest chapter in Remember to Forget, the artist’s photographic tetralogy. In Æther, Niang focuses on the abstraction of the inner self, articulating how it can evolve - in an ongoing process of metamorphosis - within spaces of resistance, uncertainty, and flux. She writes:

Report from the space in between

This place of my discovery sketches a subject filled with dots and spaces.
The gaze knows the path, the point to reach...
The spaces of resistance are punctuated spaces...
The subject of the self is more occupied with observing the points than occupying the spaces, the holes, slippages and intervals...
And yet, all of this is revealed in this unfolding world.

The blink that looks inside and outside of you... did you feel it? And yet, wasn't it necessary to feel it, to be present there?
Have you welcomed those bursts of light and color that pursue you in this negative space of vision, where within us it is dark, where the fall is infinite...
It's like the flashing of headlights... a signal... or that Morse code message, its reception. The beating of my heart between the spaces of my breath... Like a door slamming in a draught. Perseverance and renunciation...

What interests me now is what lies in between memory and oblivion.

Knowing which of the two is a point or a space? And how to jump from one to the other and add spaces and further points, becoming different, becoming free from all that I have been?
To be the space between the points... Ignoring my own metamorphosis.

You do not know yourself; you know points and some intervals...
And yet, you must confide in your own spaces, in the vertigo they give you, in that discomfort in your chest that refers you back to your own abstraction, to that place that confirms that you will only know your form after renouncing and ceasing to jump between the scattered points within you, which connect you and render you a monumental stitch.
Do you trust this void, this cliff, this foot you step into the expanse of yourself?
These moments where I continue to traverse allow me to map the resistance to being myself, present...
A creature made of dots, emptiness, and movements... That reflect me back to my selves only by accident.

This series is preceded by Call Me When You Get There, Léthé and Sama Guent Guii

The exhibition opens Saturday 11 January, 5 to 7pm