Michèle Magema
France
About the Artist
Michèle Magema is a Congolese-French video, performance, and photography artist. She was born in Kinshasa Démocratic Républic of Congo in 1977. She emigrated to Paris, France in 1984, where she currently resides. In 2002 she received her MA in fine arts from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy. In addition to being a resident artist at Cité Internationale des Arts, she has participated in the Africa Remix Exhibition. Her work has been exhibited in the Global Feminisms exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshoron Museum, and Sculpture Garden. One of her most well-known works is Oyé Oyé, (2004) a two-channel video installation, in which a woman (Magema) is shown marching in place on the left, while on the right historic footage of Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko overseeing parades of Congolese cultural pride. A key focus, for her, is articulating a permament exhange between individual stories, collective memorie and History. Her artistic work mixes performance, video, drawings, photography and installations. The plurality of his affiliations allows him to question his personal history and that of nation-states, continents and, more broadly, the world. The relationship she maintains with stories and History allows her to invent a critical posture to better dismember what takes the place of a widely shared representation, and which has come to replace History: exoticism. She uses historical facts that she interprets by means of frontal stagings and different metamorphoses. Her plural identities offer the image of a free, contemporary and hieratic being in the face of an exoticism often imposed by history. Michèle Magema is an international artist. She continues to exhibit in galleries and museums, including the Departmental Museum of Contemporary Art Rochechouart, Malmö Konsthall, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Kunsthalle Tübingen. Michèle Magema's work has been cited in numerous articles and catalogs on contemporary African art, such as Exploring a Century of Art in Congo written by Rachel Donadio for The New York Times in 2015.
About “Colors as Feelings”
If it’s possible to give a color to a feeling, then the video “Colors as Feelings” makes this relationship between colors and feelings visible. The artist offers six actions linked together by three colors: blue, yellow and red. The device functions like this : two actions for one color and one color for two opposite feelings. Michele Magema is illustrating certain primary human responses to the violence of the world. She associates these three primary colors with three emotional sequences that she tries to share with the viewer.
About “Derrière la mer”
This work of art is dedicated to all the women physically or morally abused around the world, more particularly to the victims of North Kivu, DRC. In this installation, the artist offers a poetic vision of resilience which excels violence. It represents a possible utopian solution.
