PRESENTATION: Malala Andrialavidrazana-Figures
Malala Andrialavidrazana interrogates barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts, thoughtfully shifting between private spaces and global considerations to explore social imaginaries. Over time, she has invented a language whose approach is resolutely turned toward history, while simultaneously evidencing a profound engagement with contemporary issues and developments. Based on extensive in situ as well as bibliographic and archival research, her visual compositions open up the possibility of alternative forms of storytelling and history-making.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dimitris Lempesis
Malala Andrialavidrazana is an artist who was born in Madagascar in 1971, and who lives and works in Paris, where she first studied architecture before turning towards photography. Since 2015, she has been constructing her “Figures”, (shown in Palais de Tokyo), digital photomontages created using iconographic archives that date for the most part from the 19th and 20th centuries, and which foreground the imaginaries of modernity: the expansion of capitalism, the birth of globalization by way of colonialism, the accelerated circulation of goods and images and the extraction of natural resources. The “Figures” are akin to geographical maps, on which representations drawn from stamps, banknotes, prints, advertisements and other iconographic sources selected by the artist are superimposed. If collage is an art of conflict, in which multiple contradictory realities are brought together with one another, the map is a product of mechanisms of knowledge and power situated in history as much as in geography. “Who is speaking?” and “Where are they speaking from?” are the questions that inevitably arise when we contemplate these tools. M. Andrialavidrazana creates visual collages that combine several reflections on the notions of exploration, territory, encounters, exoticism, nationalism, and cultural hybridization, as well as history and colonial relics. Their use of graphic designs and outdated colors convey the artist’s will to depict a reinterpretation of history written from a non-Western perspective. Covering antiquity to the modern era, her photomontages place different civilizations at the same level: their splendors, decadences, responsibilities, and traumas. M. Andrialavidrazana’s work is the result of a lengthy period of research aimed at neutralizing-imposed narratives and taboos in favor of critical and restorative images. Malala Andrialavidrazana regards travelling and meeting people as a permanent research process. Since the early 1990s, the artist has developed an anthropological study that focuses on rites and memory. For instance, she is known for examining various types of Malagasy funeral structures. Architecture is an integral part of her visual and conceptual training. Habitats in all their forms give us clues to how people, families, and societies function. Similarly, Andrialavidrazana’s works also generate these parallels between the individual and the collective. Andrialavidrazana uses photography, her preferred medium, to develop a visual relationship with the world, which she tries to capture and understand through experience. In 2011, she shot the photographic series “Ny Any Aminay” in Madagascar. For this series, the artist was invited into the homes of several families to take pictures of the intimacy and humility of their interiors. She explains: “Once Antananarivo residents trust you, they cherish the hope that people outside their community will cease to mistake them for what they are not. Come closer, they say. One gets to know them better as they talk about their lifestyles and the objects that surround them – ancient, in a clutter, or knick-knack – automatically or in silence. Always proud and dignified.” Her photographs depict fragments of bodies, seen from behind or partially concealed, as well as objects, textures, and colors. For two years, she broadened the scope of her research to the entire Indian Ocean: “Echoes (from Indian Ocean)” (2011-2013) led her to explore the homes of families from India, Réunion, and South Africa. Far from the Western world’s exotic, fantasised clichés, M. Andrialavidrazana has created a tactful, sociological portrait of the geographic area with which she shares her own history.
Photo: Exhibition view “Malala Andrialavidrazana : Figures”, Palais de Tokyo-Paris, 2024, Photo : © & Courtesy Dimitris Lempesis
Info: Curator: François Piron, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France, Duration: 7/10/2024-5/1/2025, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-22:00, Thu 12:00-00:00, https://palaisdetokyo.com/en
