15 - Souleymane Bachir Diaw - Sutura

Jul 6, 2026 – Oct 4, 2026

Souleymane Bachir Diaw uses family photographs to interpret the space in which the self is formed. He notably explores the manner through which images and memory perpetuate the transmission of a patriarchal model that endures to damage and weaken the intimate space often attributed to the figure of the mother. With Sutura, he mobilizes the body, which is permeated by historical and cultural legacy—in a setting of restraint where truth isn’t frontally embodied, but rather is woven through the economy of gesture and the attention given to the body itself. Here silence isn’t an absence or an erasure, but on the contrary, it becomes an inhabited, dense, sometimes restrictive matter, from which resilience can emerge in gestures of gazing and caring. The title Sutura operates at the junction of two meanings: in Wolof, the artist’s native tongue, it signifies modesty, while in Latin, it refers to sewing. Between these two meanings, Diaw creates an oeuvre imbued with healing and revelation, staging a performed body, often veiled or wrapped in textiles from the Sahel, Europe, or the Middle East. The fabric becomes a vector of transmission, a trace of circulation, a surface of protection and vulnerability, engaging a truth that can only be accessed through detours, folds, or what is retained. It is in the covering of this body, which has become a living archive, that the fabric activates an embodied memory, made up of inherited silences, gender injunctions, and historical displacements. Diaw thus echoes Saidiya Hartman’s reflections on fragmented memories, transmitted through gestures, emotions, and forms of “vulnerable presence.” For Diaw, photography is also a situated, relational, and performative truth, summoning an ethic of attention whereby looking becomes an act of patience and sensitivity. Sutura draws out the power of the implicit, showing us that the best way to tell the truth is also to protect it, to stitch it together, to make it tangible. The gaze, like the body, then learns to inhabit what is only half revealed. Nadine Hounkpatin