ANTANANARIVO
OCTOBER 2, 2025 TO MARCH 21, 2026
Fondation H presents Correspondances, a solo exhibition by Roméo Mivekannin, on view from October 2, 2025, to March 21, 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, Fahatsiarovana [Memorial], takes the form of a monumental 20-meter-long installation created in collaboration with Malagasy metalworkers. It depicts asen—portable Voodoo altars—in dialogue with Malagasy funeral relics and steles. The second textile serie consists of paintings on sewn sheets infused with an elixir of his own making, inspired by colonial postcards and embellished with embroidery by Malagasy craftswomen. All the works on view—presented here for the first time—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. 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.
BIOGRAPHY 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.
Fahatsiarovana [Memorial], 2025
A monumental installation measuring twenty metres in length, Fahatsiarovana consists of a metal structure and sixty asens — portable voodoo altars used to communicate with ancestors — created in collaboration with Finoana Ratovo's metalworking workshop in Antananarivo.
These vertical sculptures resonate with certain Malagasy funerary traditions: they form an axis connecting the earth to the sky, the living, the dead and the deities, materialising a cosmic language between the visible and the invisible, memory and oblivion. Inspired by a dream of the artist and conceived as a counter-ritual, the work reintroduces into the exhibition space presences obscured by colonisation and evangelisation.
With its ritualistic and monumental character, Fahatsiarovana offers visitors an initiatory journey, an experience of memory and poetic reparation.
It is a tribute to those who have passed away, to our loved ones, to our ancestors. Forging a link between Madagascar, a place that epitomises the coming and going of cultures from Asia, Europe and Africa, and the African continent, this work speaks of departure and return, of the art of bringing back those who have already left us.
Roméo Mivekannin
Postal cards series
Roméo Mivekannin has created a series of textile works inspired by colonial postcards, often seemingly banal but deeply violent, emblematic of a racist imagination. These images, widely circulated during the colonial period, contribute to the construction of a narrative: they impose fixed stereotypes, eroticise female bodies and establish a hierarchy of cultures.
By substituting his own face for the original ones—a recurring gesture in his practice—the artist reverses the logic of depersonalisation and inscribes an active presence in these visual archives. This gesture becomes an act of memory, rewriting and reparation: it diverts the colonial archive to give it another function, that of a tribute to anonymous figures, rescuing them from oblivion and reinserting them into a shared history.
Made from used sheets, impregnated with an elixir prepared by the artist, these works have been embellished with embroidery by the embroiderer Harivololona Rasamison in Antananarivo. This collective process establishes a co-writing in which perspectives and expertise come together.
Underneath their innocuous appearance, postcards are archives that document the construction and widespread dissemination of a colonial narrative made up of archetypal and racist images. They are often accompanied by comments and messages sent by individuals living in the colonies to friends and family in the mainland. The categorisation of cultures and the eroticisation of female bodies conveyed by postcards have helped to shape a perspective that still persists today in various forms.
Roméo Mivekannin