Paul Maheke

Based on decolonial thinking, Paul Maheke’s practice focuses on examining the power structures governing a certain Western reading of the world. To better defuse these oppressive systems, the artist honors the invisible forces (whether physical, political, or mystical), guiding and sculpting our experiences and identities. Through these processes, Paul Maheke initiates a rethinking of individual and collective imagination and memory, participating in a movement to rewrite the history of representations of the body and black and queer cultures. According to the artist, this rewriting requires a reinvention of language, which is itself a coercive framework, and this is certainly why his work often invokes the words of poets and other wordsmiths. With 'Feeling the Tides Within the Fluids of My Body’, he refers to Audre Lorde, quoting a diary entry from the 20th of February 1986, when the activist author, fighting against cancer, went to the seaside. In this text, she describes her environment as inseparable from her body. This alliance seems to give her more strength to face the violence of the world and allows her to see hope of a cure on the horizon. Printed on translucent curtains in brown and black tones, inspired by the colors of photos taken underwater in a river linked to the artist‘s childhood, the text becomes an image and draws a semantic landscape. If the curtain is often considered a means of hiding, of separating, it is rather, in the work of Paul Maheke, a bridge between interior and exterior. The work gives a view of the subconscious without cutting us off from the external landscape and its light materials move, according to the wandering of the visitors. Fluid and porous bodies, they make it possible to bring together thoughts, words, bodies, and worlds, and make them coexist. They also delimit a space of thought that is both poetic and committed. Under the guise of a domestic object, the politics of the intimate reveal themselves. Curtains protect at the same time as they expose and thus become a symbol of resilience strategies, a form of resistance embracing vulnerability.