Stanley Wany Michèle Magema Performance — Corps matériel
Stanley Wany / © UQAM, Michèle Magema, photo : Emilie Tournevache
As part of the Corps matériels exhibition, artist Stanley Wany presents an original performance designed in collaboration with curator Michèle Magema. This artistic activation extends and complements the visual journey on display: it activates the body, gestures, and memory, inviting the audience to directly engage with the material and sensory traces of history.
Stanley Wany, through his research combining oral narratives, colonial archives, and heritage objects, examines the fragmented legacies of the African diaspora. Michèle Magema, as artist-curator, guides this spatial articulation by orienting the discussion toward oral memories, colonial violences, and the dynamics of transmission.
Stanley Wany / © UQAM, Michèle Magema, photo : Emilie Tournevache
Stanley Wany is a multidisciplinary artist whose work involves revisiting colonial and historical archives with the aim of unearthing the history of his Afrodescendant ancestors. He began his exploration as an editor and creator of experimental graphic novels that explore the non-linearity of narrative and the unconscious. After a residency in Finland, he made the leap into the visual arts, continuing his research by incorporating the historicity of narratives present in popular culture. Through drawing, painting, installation and experimental graphic novels, he deepens his reflections on popular culture, myths and the subconscious in relation to the experience of Afro-descendants in Western society.
Michèle Magema is a French-Congolese visual artist, born in 1977 in Kinshasa. She graduated in 2002 from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy (DNSEP) and has been living and working in Montreal since 2022. Her interdisciplinary practice—spanning video, performance, photography, drawing, and installation—questions narratives and the memory of colonial histories, oral traditions, as well as intersectional and decolonial feminisms. She has built a solid international career, exhibiting at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Hayward Gallery in London, among others. In 2004, she was awarded the First Prize at the Dakar Biennale for Oyé Oyé, a striking dual-channel video installation. Her works are held in prestigious collections, including the Sindika Dokolo Collection in Luanda (Angola), the Contemporary Art / AfricaMuseum in Belgium, the FRAC Centre-Val de Loire in France, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, and the Attijariwafa Bank Foundation in Morocco. She is a full professor at the École des Arts Visuels et Médiatiques (UQAM). Co-founder of the USANII space, she is also an exhibition curator. She is currently pursuing her doctoral studies within the DEPA program at UQAM.