Hamedine Kane

Hamedine Kane (Mauritania, 1983) is a Senegalese artist and director living between Dakar, Brussels and Paris. His work focuses on exile, wandering, inheritance and the awareness that stems from the post-independence political experiences of some African countries. He questions their recent history, particularly that of Senegal, and reports on its upheavals and aspirations around the notions of Afro-nostalgia and Afro-utopia. Hamedine Kane is also interested in the influence of African, African-American and Afro-diasporic literature on political, social and environmental activism.

Hamedine Kane has recently participated in numerous festivals and biennials in France and internationally, such as the Dakar and Berlin Biennials in 2022, Momenta Biennial in 2021, the Taipei Biennial in 2020, and numerous exhibitions as part of the Africa2020 season in France.

At the French Academy in Rome, Hamedine Kane is developing a research project on three great black American writers exiled in Paris in the second half of the 1940s: Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin. His project takes the form of action-based research on the mode of speculative inquiry that pays close attention to “situated knowledge”, and is based on the testimonies of researchers, literary critics, publishers, historians, theorists, geographers, city specialists and tourist guides, as well as hoteliers, inhabitants and tenants of places of life and celebration. Following what the anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the art of observing”, this composition of witnesses will form the basis of a work in which Hamedine Kane will enhance the narratives of the so-called protest novel specific to the three writers, paying close attention to the experience of violence experienced and suffered and the refusal of designation that are expressed in their works.

 

Photo portrait © Daniele Molajoli
Portrait vidéo © Laurent Perreau pour l’Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis