Eight Cubic Meters by Roxane Mbanga
7 April - 8 May 2022
Sint Nicolaasstraat, Amsterdam
Like the gatherings organized by Paulette and Jeanne Nardal in Paris in the early 1930s, Roxane Mbanga organized a series of filmed dinners held every Monday in March in her multimedia installation NOIRES. She invited Amsterdam-based artists working on the perception of self, gender and/or racial identity to converse about how they are perceived in the Netherlands and its consequences on their artistic practice.
Aysu Serindaĝ, Cynthia M Makiese, Francisca Khamis, Kenneth Aidoo, Mariana Jurado-Rico, Marguerite Bones, Sasa Hara, senakirfa, Sondi and Thierno Demethus came to her home for dinner.
The installation NOIRES is a space of welcoming, listening, meeting and exchange, conceived as an immersive installation and thought as her home. In full growth, NOIRES develops over time. Itinerant, it adapts to the exhibition spaces that welcome it, transforms and rethinks itself for each place it inhabits.
Roxane's long-term objective is that the NOIRES installation will serve as a showcase for African, Caribbean and Afro-diasporic artists. Among her works you will discover objects collected in the markets of Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Benin, as well as artworks and furniture by Malian artist Kodio Gadiaba.
About Roxane Mbanga:
Roxane Mbanga is a storyteller, a multimedia artist working at the junction of fashion, film, graphic design, photography, writing, and performance. Through her installations, she highlights the perception of the self. Naked, covered with facial jewelries, embodied by objects, in movement on the crowded streets of Lagos, dressed to reveal the strength or staying still in the silence of oppression, the body speaks. Between invisibilization and hypervisibilization, she questions the place of black women in public spaces and offers the audience tools for reflection on this matter.
Mbanga graduated in 2021 from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie's Fashion department. Roxane Mbanga was selected for Rietveld Review(ed) 2021 and has been offered the opportunity to make an exhibition at Eight Cubic Meters (the academy’s public gallery in the city centre of Amsterdam) and thus bring the work to a new audience in a new context.
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