| Myriam Mihindou (Gabon, 1964) once stated, “Once a work of art has been given to the world, it no longer belongs to the artist. Anyway, the artist is just a mediator of his art. It is not he who decides to create what he creates.” |  |
Daphne Pappers
Myriam Mihindou (Gabon, 1964) once stated, “Once a work of art has been given to the world, it no longer belongs to the artist. Anyway, the artist is just a mediator of his art. It is not he who decides to create what he creates.”* Contemplating Mihindou’s work and keeping these words in the back of one’s mind, the beholder gets a glimpse of the origin of her dense objects, performances, and their recorded still or moving pictures.
Physical acts such as sculpting or performing have resulted in series of photographs such as Sculptures de Chair, objects like Fleurs de Peau, and audio-visual recordings like A Small Sculpture for a Poetry. All seem to be releasing strategies, a process that starts close to the body, gradually moving away from it, ending up with a (moving) picture.** The density of the works as well as Mihindou’s nomadic lifestyle, may explain the intervals characterizing this artist’s production.
The close-to-the-body Sculptures de Chair (Sculpted Flesh) came into being from 1999 onwards, as ways to expel and transform disturbing emotions and memories. Although the tied hands invaded by needles demonstrate pains, the solemn and open images reveal a liberating act of visualizing the untranslatable. Her cathartic images suggest a personal yet universal mythology.
As for the Fleurs de Peau (literally “flowers of skin,” derived from the French à fleur de peau, meaning “close to the skin”) series of soap objects inserted with needles, the artist took some distance from her own body. Here, the sculpting act materializes the transformative, ritualistic creation of purified “body parts” of soap.
The healing Fleurs de Peau was created in the same period as Sculptures de Chair, at Ile de la Reunion, a multicultural island near the East African coast, where renegotiating her cultural identity became possible for Mihindou. Being a child of a French mother and a Gabonese father positions her between the grand narratives of the colonizing and the colonized peoples, representing collective consciences that are referred to in post-colonial theory as respectively “Self” and “Other.”
One of her most recent works, the double-video installation A Small Sculpture for a Poetry, features a Sudanese poet. He is sharpening his pencil but he does not write. Deformed sounds accompany the images, recorded in a politically and socially turbulent Haiti in 2005. The collage of sound and image conjures up a tormented world in which the poet’s instrument is reduced without being used: a mute, but a silent witness alone with his thoughts.
There are no recently sculpted objects by this artist, who nevertheless states that sculpting is fundamental to her artistic activity. *** One could state that Mihindou’s “Other” origins allow her to integrate healing rituals in her artwork, as well as her approach of the relation between body and material. Considering the act of taking pictures and showing them as a demonstration of her “Selfness,” one realizes both sides offer familiar as well as new perspectives on what art, or by extension humanity, can be.
* Original statement of Mihindou taken from an interview in September 2008, in Paris:
‘Une fois l’oeuvre est donné au monde, elle n’appartient plus à l’artiste. De toute façon, l’artiste n’est qu’un pauvre médiateur de son art. Ce n’est pas lui qui décide de faire ce qu’il fait.’ (translation DP)** Spies in the 16th arrondissement, Daphne Pappers, Matatu (forthcoming)
*** In: Myriam Mihindou, Du matériau à l´immatériel, Dominique Blanc, in: Gabon, Présence des Esprits, Musée Dapper, 2006, p. 174
