As The Days Move Into Nights

With a focus on decolonial ideas, Congolese-born French artist Paul Maheke uses a variety of media to explore the body as a site of memory, archive, and identity construction. His familiars, presented for the first time in Canada – including older works and new pieces produced during an in situ residency – are placed in dialogue in As The Days Move Into Nights at Diagonale. Here, Maheke devotes himself to bodies, installations, sound works, and alternative paths of thought to propose zones of resistance and conversations around crossings, transitions, and transmissions. Drawings and texts excerpted from his personal journal, referring to a traumatic personal event, are deployed on body-sized coloured surfaces. Visitors thus become engaged in his emancipatory process of self-portraiture, which tends to dissolve individual experience in order to foster collective empowerment.


Extract from the exhibition presentation, Diagonale, Montréal, Canada