Sarah Maldoror: Tricontinental Cinema is the first exhibition dedicated to the work of Sarah Maldoror (1929-2020). It offers a chance to discover her cinematographic work and how she has been involved with the theatre, poetry and politics. Her multifaceted production where documentary alternates with fiction is a part of a revolutionary and decolonial cinema that is firmly anti-racist and unapologetically irreverent.
Born in the Gers, in south-west France, to a French mother and a Guadeloupian father, Sarah Maldoror is considered a pioneer of African cinema, engaged in particular in the liberation movements of Portuguese colonies (Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau) but also close to the poets of the Francophone Caribbean (Césaire, Damas, Glissant). She plays upon these labels and proximities even as her work defies all frontiers of geography and genre.
Conceived as a landscape of films that superimposes histories and geographies, the exhibition looks back over the cities where Sarah Maldoror has lived – Paris, Moscow, Conakry, Algiers, Fort-de-France and Saint-Denis. It sheds light upon the dialogues that Sarah Maldoror instigated with intellectual, artistic and political figures including Mário Pinto de Andrade, Aimé Césaire, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Chris Marker and William Klein; it also seeks to create new conversation with contemporary artists (Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Melvin Edwards, Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Kapwani Kiwanga, Maya Mihindou, Chloé Quenum, Maud Sulter and Anna Tje) and to praize the efforts of artists like Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc who have promoted awareness of Sarah Maldoror’s work in the field of contemporary art.
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