Maty Biayenda

Born in Namibia in 1998, Maty Biayenda is a Franco-Congolese artist who graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris with a degree in textile and material design. Her work combines painting, drawing, embroidery, textile printing, video, and installation. Drawing on personal archives, historical documents, and images from popular culture, she explores racialized queer representations, constructions of identity, and processes of self-reinvention. Her works examine the connections between memory, personal mythology, perception, visibility, and transmission through immersive installations in which textiles play a central role.

Maty Biayenda’s residency project builds on her ongoing research into backstage areas as spaces of transition, transformation, and negotiation between visibility and intimacy. Through an immersive installation combining textiles, painting, and video, she explores the connections between the gaze, representation, and the construction of identities. Drawing on family archives, personal photographs, and the history of postwar drag cabarets, the project creates a tension between on-stage and off-stage, reality and autofiction, while exploring processes of self-reinvention and forms of gender performativity as survival tactics.