Opening : Wednesday 24.09.25, 6pm to 9pm
Curator : Maëlle Dault
Maty Biayenda was born in Namibia in 1998. She lives and works in Paris. After training at the ateliers de Sèvres, she graduated from the École Nationale Supérieur des arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2023. She is currently in residence at Artagon, Pantin.
Maty Biayenda creates a kaleidoscope of aesthetic experiments in a variety of media: paintings on canvas or wood, drawings on paper or printed on fabric, installations and videos. Of French-Congolese origin, her research into the objectification and liberation of black female bodies, via the notion of fetishism, has led her to tackle the issue of racialized transgender representations. She has assembled a visual archive of nightlife icons, uniting the beauty queens of 1980s New York, the transformist performers of Parisian cabarets Chez Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel, and images from glamour magazines. The world she depicts does not distinguish between personal memory and collective imagination, nor between real and fictitious personalities. Maty Biayenda also frees herself from a notion of the commodification of the body, referring to a popular culture of intimacy in which the deconstruction of social, racial and gender codes invites us to rethink the norms that still shape our societies.
Rendez-vous
Conversations de Plateau
from Maty Biayenda’s Project Room
with Maëlle Dault, exhibition curator, and Maty Biayenda
Wednesday, October 1, 7:30 p.m.
Free admission, no reservation required