Marie-Florine Demosthene travels from Accra, Ghana to Johannesburg, South Africa, to begin a month-long residency at Gallery MOMO (January 4-29)
About:
Bitta’s Attention.
Born in New York and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haïti, Marie-Florine Demosthene is a visual artist working across the media of painting, installation and performance. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons the New School for Design and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York. She has shown extensively through group and solo exhibitions in USA, Caribbean, UK, Slovakia, Germany and West Africa. Her work examines the ways in which black culture is codified and commodified. Playing with stereotypes and conventional representations of the black body, her works magnify the subtlety of racial constructs in order to draw viewers to confront how comfortable they have become with derogatory images.
The Debacle.
During her residency at the Gallery MOMO, Ms Demosthene will be working on a new project titled Get Azzmatized !, in which she will be exploring the representation of the black female body in contemporary visual culture together with the concept of transformative feminine power. To this end, she will be staging a series of series of street performances and gallery installations in and around Johannesburg in she will become the voluptuous super-heroine Azzmama. These will be recorded in ten short silent films and three audio recordings, which will be interwoven and exhibited in a cohesive gallery installation at the end of Ms Demosthene’s residency.
As it was the beginning.
“I’ve been intrigued by the black female body in contemporary visual culture and I’m piqued by how her physical size is supposed to dictate a certain set of ideals and behavior. Borrowing from Jonathan Swifts, Gulliver’s Travels, I chronicled my journey through the Caribbean and West Africa in a series of drawings entitled, The Capture. These mix media pieces, textual mélanges of ink, oil, graphite and charcoal, depict voluptuous female figures amid a strange world of decay and destruction.”
Wonder Twins.
Courtesy MOMO Gallery Johannesburg.