Remember to Forget

An artist's book collecting three powerful portrait series engaging with questions of contemporary Black representation.
Encompasses motion-blurred images of residents of Soweto captured using mapping technology as well as blurred head-and-shoulder portraits, questioning relations of self, memory, and place.

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A carefully curated artist's book, Remember to Forget is a tetralogy comprised of Mame-Diarra Niang's series Call Me When You Get There, Lethe, Sama Guent Guii, and AEther.

The works reflect on the abstraction of the Black body and the artist's refusal to portray Blackness for herself and for others. Niang's concept of the plasticity of territory as a constantly evolving and shifting entity is at the root of her work and is expanded here through different modes of non-portraiture. In these images, the self dissolves, vanishes, recedes, refracts, and appears fragmented and blurred.

In the artist's own words:

'My work is about memory and forgetting. What makes a self? I have come to think of the self as a territory made of well-curated memories and erasures. Remember to Forget places us where being itself is a forgotten monument; where even the most persistent conception of identity dissolves in front of us. We have to forget what we were in order to become anew... Naitre et n'etre rien.'