ANTANANARIVO
3 OCTOBER 2025 TO 21 MARCH 2026
Fondation H presents Correspondances, a solo exhibition by Roméo Mivekannin, on view from 3 October 2025, to 21 March 2026. The French-Beninese artist, invited to create an exhibition in dialogue with Malagasy history, territory, and culture, explores historical narratives, colonial representations, and spiritual transmissions within the local context. The exhibition will occupy Fondation H’s upper floor for five months, in Antananarivo, Madagascar.
The title Correspondances stands as a key interpretative lens for Roméo Mivekannin’s solo exhibition at Fondation H. For this project, the artist refers to colonial postcards—both intimate and ideological objects—which he critically reappropriates through textile painting.
The term Correspondances also evokes echoes between different temporalities, narratives, and gestures of repair, extending to the geographic connections between France, Benin, and Madagascar—between colonial pasts and contemporary resistances, between erased figures and their reinsertion into an active memory. The exhibition thus becomes a site for dialogue between narratives, memories, and gestures of repair.
Correspondances embodies a weaving of multiple voices/visions/hands: between archives and new creations, between continents and insularities, between artistic gestures and artisanal ones, between the absent and the living.
For this exhibition, the artist presents two series of works. The first, La mémoire, l’écriture, l’archive [Memory, writing, and archive], consists of textile paintings inspired by colonial postcards, enhanced with embroidery by Malagasy craftswomen. The second series, Le chant des sept tours [The song of the seven towers], takes the form of a monumental installation made of bricks and iron, extending Mivekannin’s reflection on memory, spirituality, and the invisible bonds that unite communities across time and territories. All of the exhibited works — never shown before — were produced between the artist’s studio in Toulouse and Antananarivo, drawing on local artisanal expertise.
Fondation H has organised a diverse array of events and activities for the general public. The opening highlight on 3 and 4 October, 2025, features discussions and performances programme involving local and international personalities. Throughout the year, every Saturday from 14:00 to 16 00, Fondation H hosts public events, including conferences, lectures, workshops, performances, and screenings. Tailor-made visits and workshops are organised by appointment for specific audiences, particularly children aged 6 to 14, through partnerships with public schools and organisations supporting vulnerable youth. A range of mediation tools is also made available to accommodate visitors with disabilities: accessible tours in Malagasy sign language or adapted formats for a variety of physical and mental disabilities, in collaboration with partner NGOs.
BIOGRAPHIE OF ROMEO MIVEKANNIN
Born in 1986 in Bouaké (Ivory Coast), Roméo Mivekannin lives and works between Toulouse (France) and Cotonou (Benin).
After training as a cabinetmaker and studying art history, Roméo Mivekannin chose to enter the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Toulouse. In parallel to his studies, he developed a personal work of plastic creation, and experimented with several mediums, from sculpture to painting. Following his studies, he devoted himself to his work as a visual artist while beginning a thesis on the history of art, sociology and architecture.
At the crossroads of inherited tradition and the contemporary world, Roméo Mivekannin integrates his creations within an ancestral temporality, making his own rituals, echoing the voodoo cosmology, very present in Benin. Between painting, sculpture and installation, his universe is multidisciplinary and ambitious. The artist plays with materials and seeks to upset the established boundaries between disciplines, in order to operate both formally and symbolically an act of break-in that is unique to him.
With strength and subtlety, the artist unravels the threads of our confinement a little more each time, and thus questions our collective and intimate heritage. The artist’s works propose a form of resistance strategy that mixes emotion with a critical eye.
