Minia Biabiany: Spelling

A beginning. To open, to introduce.

An artist is invited to live and work in our city for three months. We call it a residency. It is an open invitation, extended in the spirit of mutual curiosity and trust. It is an invitation to work together and allow the process to find its own pace. Together we decide to think and treat the exhibition as unfixed time—alive and changing over the days and weeks to come. Or maybe, as an archipelago—like islands belonging to the space, connected by water in constant motion. 

The artist is Minia Biabiany. Her spatial compositions perform a visual vocabulary that weaves together her concerns on a Caribbean present formed by our shared History. Through repetition—as a way of rethinking—and aggregation—as a way of composing—a map of our creolized world slowly emerges. It is based on connecting points marked by violence, silencing strategies, and legacies of resistance. A recurrent questioning of place accompanies every layer in this texture. 

We imagine the exhibition as a visual and rhythmical movement beginning with an initial spatial articulation, like the first carefully selected words in a sentence formulated by an archipelagic thinking. An understanding that a single island can not be fully grasped without a sense of its relationship to the whole. Like an evolving and unfolding sentence that will be erased, re-formulated and recomposed again, some meanings will shift, while others will escape us; some will reappear, others still will leave only traces. An ignored colonial past is resurfacing weaving a relation between distant geographical points, and moments in time. The linear, sequential order of syntax is fragmented. 

Slowly and firmly, we allow time to be fluid and resist a constricting structure.
We invite you to share this time with us. 

Minia Biabiany holds an Iaspis residency in Malmö hosted by Signal during April 1–June 30, 2016.

Signal is run by Carl Lindh, Joel Odebrant, Matthew Rana and Elena Tzotzi.