Myriam Mihindou in conversation with Mara Sartore. Evoking presence, power, and protection
Myriam Mihindou
MS On October 17, 2024, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris inaugurates ‘Praesentia’, a solo exhibition dedicated to your work from the past twenty years, including new productions. How have you organized your work, and what is the deeper meaning of this exhibition?
MM This exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is part of the long history of my artistic journey, which, in short, has a common thread of making space for presences—whether human, plants, territories, or subtle bodies—with a focus on repair and healing. At the Palais de Tokyo, I worked with curators Daria de Beauvais and Marie Cozette, under the guidance of Guillaume Désanges, to develop a project. From our fruitful discussions, we identified the main lines of work based on what was important to me: that the stories be embodied.
MS How do you think your practice has changed over all this time?
MM The concepts of immersion and vision have always been central to my work. I dive into the beauty and the ugliness of the world to uncover the mechanisms behind oppression and resistance, solidarity and manipulation, energy and exhaustion. I aim for my work to be a vehicle for expression, a space for collaboration, exchange, and reflection.
Today, I’m closing one chapter of my work before moving on to new themes. I’m revisiting my video archives and beginning a new series of drawings and photographs.
MS “Praesentia” is the title of the exhibition, described as a polysemic term evoking presence, power, and protection. What is the relationship between protection and power in the context of the exhibition?
MM Power here is a force granted by life experience. It is a resilience comparable to the energy of nature reclaiming its rights. It is a strength—what Gilles Deleuze preferred to call “power”—that restores you after a loss of balance, allowing you to act and making change possible. In this way, it is protective. Strength is the primary element of organization and realization that one works with in animist initiation spaces. Admitting one’s weaknesses—impotence—requires learning to know oneself. Healing them means embracing memories, transmissions, and inheritances as materials to be transformed in order to restore the body and consciousness in a virtuous way. On a political level, the mechanisms of power call for counter-powers, which become a form of defiance against power itself. This is the realization I’ve come to in this exhibition.
MS You have described your practice as an investigation into the physical and mental impacts of trauma caused by colonial or oppressive systems. Your visual and plastic works are gateways or decompression chambers that allow bodies to restore, awaken, and heal. Could you tell us more about these traumas and how art can heal them?
MM I have lived in Gabon and many countries where the body is tested. I have experienced the displacement of the body from one territory to another, and I have understood the trauma and all the collateral damage this entails. I have lived through cycles of oppressive political governance that affect our bodies and minds. The impacts on our identities and imaginations are heavy: we become heirs to a system.
In the victim’s body, everything is locked up, and all sensory capacity is annihilated. This system of dispossession and spoliation affects the way we live, feel, and envision the future.
It is necessary to break free from this disoriented and anesthetized body in order to be reborn, to invent what I call a legitimate and effective citizen identity.
So yes, my works are observations and gateways that offer these bodies, in their dignity, the possibility of achieving themselves by sublimating this infraction. The praesentia of these bodies in struggle is a mirror of our own fragility and strength, our common ground. Because the oppressor is as ill as the victim, and their children pay the price. It is vital that the new generation heals.
Art can heal, just as beauty and love work, making resilience and escape possible. Healing is a journey that no constraint or imposition can prevent.
MS You are well known for your artistic performances conceived as rituals, as tests of the body to transcend trauma, violence, or injury. Will there be a performance program included in the exhibition?
MM I am presenting a performance where I want to share the experience of my techniques that allow the body, like a vast landscape, to irrigate itself from the depths of being, of the soul, of the cosmos. This approach, which I’ve been refining over many years through encounters and experimentation, enables a release and a reconnection with fundamental elements.
MS You were born and raised in Gabon and have lived in many countries. What was it like to settle in France in the late 1980s?
MM I grew up in Gabon and later lived in mainland France, Egypt, Morocco, and on the island of Réunion. These are faraway territories where cultures, languages, and accents are experienced as joyful polyphonies, where body and soul are not separated. When I moved to France in the 1980s, the country was still deeply rooted in its regional traditions, though it was already suffering from the loss of its ancestral rural culture. Today, it rests more firmly on a stubborn capitalist model, and this shift, I believe, disorients many French people.
MS What is your current relationship with the city of Paris? How do you like living and working there? Could you recommend at least five places to visit?
MM I love Paris because all the world’s people live together here, though this new Paris gazes down on us—I miss its defiant and romantic spirit from before the lockdown. But I find that the communication difficulties, already burdensome, now seem to give way to something worse: a lack of connection, interaction, presence. In truth, today, my intimate spaces in France are outside of Paris, and what interests me more is the whole of France: its people, its immigrants, the old and the new, its diaspora, its seas, mountains, abandoned villages, cities, cantons, and culture. In Paris, I have never had specific places. I love discovering different atmospheres, allowing myself to be taught and surprised, so I move through all the neighborhoods of Paris and its suburbs, from one meeting to another, and I keep discovering new places… the periphery is my hobby! That’s what I would recommend: let yourself be surprised.
Image credits:
1. Myriam Mihindou, Ad altiorem memoriam oedipodis [To the High Memory], 2022, View from the exhibition “The Great Exorcism. Chapter 1,” Palais de Tokyo (Paris), 2022. Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maïa Muller (Paris) © ADAGP, Paris, 2024. Photo credit: Aurélien Mole.
2. Myriam Mihindou, Skin Flowers series, 1999 – present, View from the exhibition “Elective Affinities,” Galerie Maïa Muller (Paris), 2020. Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maïa Muller (Paris) © ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
3. Myriam Mihindou, Embody 1, 2017, Materials: tea, copper, needles, etymologies, paper, cotton feathers, silk, thread, pencil, carbon. Dimensions: 75 x 100 cm. Private collection. Courtesy of Myriam Mihindou & Galerie Maïa Muller © ADAGP, Paris.
4. Myriam Mihindou, The Dress Flown Away, Casa África (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain), June 28, 2008, Video, 20 minutes. Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maïa Muller (Paris) © ADAGP, Paris, 2024.
5. Myriam Mihindou, Face, from the series “The Shaken Tongue,” 2018, Materials: copper, carbon. Dimensions: 40 x 30 cm. Courtesy of Myriam Mihindou & Galerie Maïa Muller © ADAGP, Paris.
6. Myriam Mihindou, Service, 2000 – ongoing, Exhibition view “Silo,” Transpalette (Bourges), 2021. Courtesy of Myriam Mihindou & Galerie Maïa Muller © ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Margot Montigny.
