Mame-Diarra Niang’s ‘Identical Guent Guii’: “Forgetting is also a starting level”

This provocation turns into extra pronounced when one reads Sama Guent Guii in relation to the numerous — racial, nationwide and cultural — elements that make up Mame-Diarra Niang as she shares in a poem written for the exhibition that reads:

I’m the previous which reappears

I’m what is reworked by their recollections and my recollections

I’m these black our bodies that I don’t acknowledge

I’m this blur

I’m manufactured from reminiscence and oblivion

I’m this monument of nature, this being that is frequently being reborn

This different, who sees themselves as the opposite.

With this physique of labor, Niang makes use of ethereality and abstraction by way of the blur, as an affirmation of her refusal to painting Blackness as we have now come to know and consider it, like Binyavanga Wainaina’s Plastic Man in One Day I Will Write About This Place, who has, “Indifferent his physique from these restraints. He is teasing time and house. His physique is a needle, ducking headfirst into the stiff cloth of the world we all know… Now he scrambles historical past together with his bod, makes all of it a recreation for the physique to get pleasure from; he is extra versatile than physics. He is a plastic man, and he can not fail.”

Mame-Diarra Niang’s Sama Guent Guii is on present at STEVENSON gallery, Johannesburg, till 19 November 2022.