Binta Diaw: Where the lianas intertwine

PAV Parco Arte Vivente is pleased to announce Dove le liane s’intrecciano. Resistenze, alleanze, terre (Where the lianas intertwine. Resistances, alliances, lands), the solo show by Binta Diaw, curated by Marco Scotini. Following previous solo exhibitions by Navjot Altaf, Arahmaiani, and Regina José Galindo, Diaw’s project continues PAV’s exploration of the intersection between nature and feminist thought at a moment of deep ecological and social transformation.

Taking its title from the plant world, the exhibition evokes the poetic and political qualities of the liana, a climbing plant that twists, resists, and survives through interconnection. For Diaw, this vegetal image becomes a metaphor for resilience, mutual support, and the relational fabric that sustains both ecosystems and diasporic identities. Drawing on the traditions and diasporic histories of Afro-descendant women, the artist reflects on memory, survival, and the possibility of new alliances within a collapsing global environment.

Born in Milan in 1995 to Senegalese parents, Binta Diaw has developed an artistic practice that weaves together ecology, Black feminism, and diasporic memory. Her work explores the relationship between the body, nature, and colonial history, reimagining the body as both a political and a living archive. She works with materials poised between organicity and artifice: soil, as an element of reconnection with the natural world, and synthetic hair, which African women use as extensions of their own hair, symbols of beauty and cultural identity.

At the centre of the exhibition are two key installations. Dïà s p o r a, first shown at the 12th Berlin Biennale, takes the form of a suspended web-like structure woven from synthetic braids. These hair strands recall the hidden acts of resistance by enslaved African women who, within their braids, concealed maps or seeds from their homeland. In Diaw’s hands, these gestures become symbols of transmission and resilience, transforming the exhibition space into a site of poetic and political resistance.

In Chorus of Soil, the artist combines archival memory and organic matter. Using earth mixed with seeds such as tomato and melon, Diaw traces on the floor the blueprint of the 18th-century slave ship Brooks, evoking the forced displacement of more than five thousand Africans across the Atlantic. As the seeds sprout over time, the ship’s outline turns into a living garden, a powerful metaphor of regeneration and collective survival.

The Paysage Corporel and Nature series of works features the body of the artist, transformed and reinterpreted as a landscape. Through interventions with traces of plaster or installation elements, Diaw builds a sensitive geography that evokes the survival and regeneration paths of the plant world.

Installed in PAV’s courtyard, Naître au monde, c'est concevoir (vivre) enfin le monde comme relation, a work that is inspired by the eco-feminist readings of mangroves in Senegal.

Completing the exhibition is the video Essere corpo (Being Body), which connects all the installations through movement, voice, and gesture, reinforcing Diaw’s idea of the body as a site of memory and a bridge to the living world. Across the exhibition, installations unfold like organic landscapes, roots, vines, and braids that guide the visitor through spaces of grounding and passage. The result is a collective ecology of forms where aesthetic experience and political reflection are inseparable.

With Dove le liane s’intrecciano. Resistenze, alleanze, terre (Where the lianas intertwine. Resistances, alliances, lands), PAV continues its long-term research into political ecologies and the redefinition of relations between nature and the global social fabric. Diaw’s work asserts art as a relational field where diasporic memory and vegetal forms intertwine to imagine new communities and possibilities of belonging.

Binta Diaw (b. 1995, Milan) is an Italian-Senegalese visual artist working across installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Her research engages with migration, diasporic identity, belonging, and gender issues through materials such as soil, hair, rope, and organic matter. Diaw’s work has been shown internationally in institutions including MAXXI (Rome), Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Museo Madre (Naples), Berlin Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Castello di Rivoli, Gwanju Biennale, and Galerie Cécile Fakhoury (Paris, Dakar, Abidjan).

Supported by:
Compagnia di San Paolo, Fondazione CRT, Regione Piemonte, and Città di Torino

Part of New Perspectives for Action, a project by Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the European Union.