ANTANANARIVO
JANUARY 15 - APRIL 15, 2024
Originally from France and Madagascar, Amalia Ramanankirahina is invited by Fondation H for a production residency in Antananarivo from January to April 2024, as part of the exhibition Memoria: Accounts of Another History.
Amalia Ramanankirahina (France, Madagascar) was born in 1963 in Paris, where she lives and works. Her artistic practice stands at the crossroads of biography and political history, although her imagination is not restricted to historical and ethno-cultural determinations.
This residency is an opportunity for the artist to return to Madagascar after a ten-year absence. Her aim is to share and reinvent her connection to the Malagasy land through an artistic practice characterized by a mix of different media and points of view.
Through the scaffolding-installation she is setting up in this context, the artist seeks to rethink History by invoking a multitude of stories, which are sometimes fragile and layered with both fiction and reality, with reported words and invented images. She wants to take this opportunity to complete her “test gardens” series of drawings by integrating elements gathered during her residency: silhouette drawings in black and graphite inks on crystal paper, botanical germinations, mineral collections, and samples of memory traces. In short, so much artistic experimentations driven by the resonances and encounters which feed this scaffolding of stories.
AMALIA RAMANANKIRAHINA’S BIOGRAPHY
Amalia Ramanankirahina graduated from the Sorbonne in 1996 with a master’s degree in conservation and restoration of cultural heritage. She was invited twice to the Dakar Biennale (2010 and 2012), where she presented paintings with organic motifs, as well as an installation named Monument, which questions the great historical concussions of colonial conquest and decolonization. In 2013, she began a series of photomontages of family portraits she collected in Antananarivo. In her latest series, Les plantes font aussi la guerre [Plants go to war too], she examines the exploitation of natural resources in echo of the history of human displacements and colonial destruction, which can also lead to acts of resistance and transformation and open the door to a power capable of imagining another world.