Michèle Magema | |
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 Michèle Magema |
Michèle Magema (born 1977) is a Congolese-French visual artist, known primarily for her video, performance, photography and drawing. Born in Kinshasa, DRC, she currently resides in Nevers, France. Magema's work considers memory, the multiplicity of histories, and temporality.
Magema was born in Kinshasa, Zaire in 1977. She emigrated to Paris, France in 1984. Magema's father was politically active in France as a political refugee. In 2002, Michèle Magema received her MA in fine arts from l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy. After her graduation, she traveled to South Korea for a post-diploma residency, followed by an Ifritry residency in Morocco. In addition to being a resident artist at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris, she has participated in the Africa Remix Exhibition. Her work has been exhibited in the Global Feminisms exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and the Hirshoron Museum and Sculpture Garden.
With a background in plastic art, Michèle Magema started her career as a painter. Then, she followed experimenting with video, performance, photography and finally mixing video with drawing and text. Currently, she is a multimedia interdisciplinary artist expressing herself mainly through video performance, where she overlaid different medias such as photography with drawing, drawing with video, and photo on lace. The art of Michèle Magema has been influenced by many disciplines and artists: in literature and poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, Maya Angelou, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Edouard Glissant, and Frantz Fanon; in music by Billie Holiday; in experimental cinema by Antonioni, Fellini, Roberto Rossilini, Wim Wenders, and Ingmar Bergman, as well as from women artists like Pipilitorist, Cindy Sherman, Anna Mendieta, Eva Esse, Gina Pane, and Renée Green.
Michèle Magema's artworks are at the intermediary mental zone between individual histories, global history, and art history. She establishes a permanent dialogue between her own stories and souvenirs with the collective memory of the spectators by approaching different themes such as feminism, sociology, politics, and mythology. The presence or the absence of the body is always at the centre of her work.
Michèle Magema earned several art awards and professional achievements, among which the first prize of the Dakar Biennale in 2004 and the Yango Biennale IFAA prize in 2014. Some of her works are stored within private contemporary art collections, including Sindika Dokolo Collection in Luanda (Angola), Tervuren Contemporary Collection (Belgium) and the Artothèque Villeurbanne (France).
One of her most well-known works is Oyé Oyé, (2004) a two‐channel video installation, in which a woman (Magema) is shown marching in place on the left, while on the right historic footage of Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko overseeing parades of Congolese cultural pride.
During Michèle Magema's time at École nationale supériere des Beaux-Arts (National School for Fine Arts) at Cergy, she was unable to find female Congolese artists from which to draw inspiration. This experience led her to decide to become a notable female Congolese artist herself. Magema's artwork contends with the notion of Afro-feminisms. She has shared that, in her conception of Afro-feminism, the matrilineal line holds significance—a value passed down from her own mother. She says that her work Mémoire Hévéa (translated from French as Rubber Tree Memory) explores this concept of feminist heritage. Magema subscribes to the idea of multiple fluid feminisms.
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