Minia Biabiany: pluie sur mer (rain on sea)

Minia Biabiany‘s examination of Caribbean identity is marked by relationships to place and to stories, through delicate videos and installations that, by connecting objects, plants, reimagined symbolic representations and bodily movement, subtly delineate a poetics of form.

Delicately balanced between the poetic and the political, between aesthetics and ethics, Minia Biabiany’s work articulates the personal memory of a woman from Basse-Terre with the complex story of a Guadeloupe under the marked influence of its colonial past and resulting present-day assimilation.

The artist brings together a variety of heterogeneous materials (cotton, wood, shafts of metal, bamboo, banana leaves, cloth, salt, chalk, etc.) and consistently organises them with crystal-clear precision as any number of clues to an underlying narrative that remains concealed. For all that, this work – more hinted at than imposed – can be described as ‘loaded’ in the sense that it contains the memory of things in a similar way to the memory of water: bearing an indelible but transparent mark or remanence that pierces the surface of the objects.