Silent Violence: Roméo Mivekannin questions colonial images at the Musée du quai Branly

Museums transformed into aviaries and historical photographs seen through a mirror: Roméo Mivekannin shifts the gaze in Silent Violence, at the Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac Museum.

The exhibition brings together thirteen large-format paintings, four iron sculptures and one ceramic work, most of them created for this presentation. The artist examines the colonial history of museums and “ethnographic exhibitions,” which presented people as objects of curiosity in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The four enclosed aviaries echo the forms of the Museum of Ethnography at the Trocadéro, the west wing of the Palais de Chaillot, the Musée de la Porte Dorée and the Quai Branly. Made with blacksmiths in Abidjan, they give material form to the idea of confinement.

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The paintings revisit images held by the museum, including human exhibitions staged at the Champ-de-Mars, the Jardin d’Acclimatation and the Folies Bergère. The original photographs appear behind a one-way mirror, confronting visitors with their own position as observers.

Presented in the Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière Gallery, this exhibition was conceived by Gaëlle Beaujean, head of the African collections, with Christine Barthe providing scientific advice on the photographic collections.

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