Minia Biabiany

Lives and works in Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe

Artist statement

Minia Biabiany’s practice weaves together questions of habitat, human and more-than-human bodies, and language. She creates poetical immersive environments that call audiences to read and feel within the layered colonial histories and their legacies, questions the relations with spaces – both mental space and places –, and reappropriates learning and healing methods as tools. By unearthing traces of the colonial plantation and assimilation systems that continue to impact the archipelago of Guadeloupe, she often uses plants as guides to look at silence, lost knowledge, or forgotten remnants. While crossing her installations, the viewer is invited to engage and project with personal and collective narrative threads kept partly open. Biabiany builds “choreography for the gazes,” and asks for presence, for a change in our rhythm of perception and attention. Her different installations are thought of as phrases continuing one chanting.

Artwork