Violence silencieuse. Sous le regard de Roméo Mivekannin

Exhibition Silent Violence. Invitation to Roméo Mivekannin

From 10 November 2026 to 4 April 2027

Born in Bouaké (Ivory Coast) in 1986, Roméo Mivekannin, a Beninese artist, develops work that critically examines colonial history and the systems representing Black bodies in Europe. Living and working today in Toulouse, he was exhibited there for the first time at FRAC Occitanie – Les Abattoirs at the end of the 2010. His work, mainly pictorial, combines acrylic paint and brown mud elixir applied to French cotton sheets. Based on paintings and photographs produced by Europeans, the artist revisits Black models and regularly incorporates himself into the scenes depicted through self-portraiture.

The exhibition offers the public a critical journey through ethnographic exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, also known today as "human zoos", during which non-European objects and individuals were displaced and stripped of their status to become curiosities subjected to the Western gaze. Taking Paris and its emblematic places as an anchor point, Roméo Mivekannin questions both the colonial heritage of museum institutions and the silent violence contained in the images of these human stagings.

For this exhibition, the artist created a previously unseen ensemble consisting of four metal sculptures, fourteen large-format paintings, and a ceramic work. The sculptures, made by Ivorian blacksmiths in Abidjan following the artist's instructions, take the form of closed aviaries without openings. They reproduce, on a reduced scale, the founding buildings of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac and its predecessor institutions. This setup evokes the symbolic and material confinement inherent in certain museum practices, inviting visitors to take a critical look at the history of exhibition spaces themselves.

The central sequence of the tour consists of fourteen canvases associated with original photographs and glass plates from the collections of the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac. Through self-portraits, the artist inserts himself into scenes of ethnographic exhibitions on the Champ-de-Mars, at the Jardin d’Acclimatation, or at the Folies Bergère.

The scenographic design directly engages the audience: the original images are only revealed upon request, in a play of reflections where visitors see themselves looking, in turn becoming actors in the system of viewing and questioning.