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Lot Essay
Deploying a technique that combines photography, collage, drawing and text, Malala Andrialavidrazana creates assemblages that question history and examine the interplay of cultures and hierarchies of power. Her Figures series assembles fragments of images from different eras into rich collages of ephemera, including old maps, banknotes and record sleeves. The blending of these diverse elements, which straddle many different cultures and time periods, serves to critique notions of Exoticism in a playful and nuanced way.
Within the context of Africa, European maps carry a pronounced symbolism due to the way in which African nations were carved up amongst European powers during the Colonial period. National borders were drawn arbitrarily, and cobbling together diverse groups of people into new nations has led to extreme and complex issues. Conversely, maps continue to be symbolically imbued with apparent Enlightenment virtues of Truth and Order. It is the coded symbols of Eurocentric Exoticism that Andrialavidrazana reconstitutes in Figures 1889, Planisferio. The images and reproductions she has selected were once used to reinforce stereotypes of African and Indian Ocean cultures, which were used as instruments of Colonialism and become inextricably linked to the state apparatus of control. When collaged together and overlapping one another, the images’ ideological frameworks bubble to the surface, Andrialavidrazana skilfully reframes these outmoded methods of representation.
Andrialavidrazana grew up in Madagascar and currently lives and works in Paris. She won the HSBC Photography Prize in 2004, after which her work was included in the 6th Bamako Biennale. Her work has been shown at Warsaw MoMA; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Ford Foundation, New York; the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Within the context of Africa, European maps carry a pronounced symbolism due to the way in which African nations were carved up amongst European powers during the Colonial period. National borders were drawn arbitrarily, and cobbling together diverse groups of people into new nations has led to extreme and complex issues. Conversely, maps continue to be symbolically imbued with apparent Enlightenment virtues of Truth and Order. It is the coded symbols of Eurocentric Exoticism that Andrialavidrazana reconstitutes in Figures 1889, Planisferio. The images and reproductions she has selected were once used to reinforce stereotypes of African and Indian Ocean cultures, which were used as instruments of Colonialism and become inextricably linked to the state apparatus of control. When collaged together and overlapping one another, the images’ ideological frameworks bubble to the surface, Andrialavidrazana skilfully reframes these outmoded methods of representation.
Andrialavidrazana grew up in Madagascar and currently lives and works in Paris. She won the HSBC Photography Prize in 2004, after which her work was included in the 6th Bamako Biennale. Her work has been shown at Warsaw MoMA; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Ford Foundation, New York; the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels and the Pompidou Centre, Paris.