Malala Andrialavidrazana
Born in 1971 in (Madagascar)
Lives and practices in Paris (France)
By way of the photographic medium, Malala Andrialavidrazana’s practice interrogates barriers and interactions within cross-cultural contexts, thoughtfully shifting between private spaces and global considerations to explore social imaginaries. 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. Andrialavidrazana graduated from La Villette School of Architecture (Paris) in 1996. Her d’Outre-Monde series was awarded the prestigious HSBC Prize for Photography, and released in print by the renowned Actes Sud publishing house in 2004. She received the joint support of the Institut Français and the National Arts Council of South Africa for her series Echoes (from Indian Ocean), published in 2013 by Kehrer Verlag. At the moment, Andrialavidrazana is at work on an ongoing series titled Figures, highlighted in the present installation. Over the past years, Andrialavidrazana’s work has been exhibited in numerous international venues. Recently, these have included: Bamako Encounters (Mali 2015); Museum of Natural History (Le Havre, France 2016); Kehrer Galerie (Berlin 2016); Changjiang International Photography & Video Biennial (Chonqing, China 2017); Kalmar Konstmuseum (Kalmar, Sweden 2017); PAC Milano (Milan 2017); Lyon Biennial (Lyon 2017); C-Gallery (Milan 2017); 50 Golborne (London 2017).
Figures is the title of Malala Andrialavidrazana’s most recent series of works, an ongoing project initiated in 2015. In the present installation, the works are shown as large-scale projections. This is unusual; typically, they are displayed as physical prints over one meter in height. Overlays of 19th and 20th century maps, bank notes and stamps cut, reshaped and rethought by the artist, give rise in Figures to novel cartographies that speak powerful truth to power. Individually and as a unit, the resulting works highlight falsehoods inherent in the colonizing powers’ claim to objective and rational “knowledge” – to the North’s (ongoing) deployment of science as a weapon in the subjugation of peoples and territories. Clichés, pre- and misconceptions are at once subtly and incisively brought to the fore, as are fundamental misunderstandings as to how maps function and to what ends. The resulting works demand of the viewer that s/he (re)consider her position not only as a subject gazing at a work of art, but also as an actor in the forging of a world riven with the violence of power relations.
