The Citadel: a trilogy

The Citadel is the story of an inner journey, told in three movements. It maps a route through discovery, loss, and renewal across landscapes equally real and imagined by the artist. In 2007, Mame-Diarra Niang returned to Senegal to bury her father after spending years away living in France. Her intimate interest in the notion of territory translates into a refracted representation of the landscapes she rediscovered on this visit. The places before Niang’s lens are at once forensically studied and transformed into fabular non-places.  Sahel Gris depicts a no-man’s land where infrastructural projects lay abandoned to the dust. It holds the roots of The Citadel, its ‘ground zero’, where the continuous horizon line evokes a state of permanent suspension between movement and inertia. In At the Wall, Niang pauses at a place of rest and interrogation, an oracle, and the gate to The Citadel. In Metropolis, Niang steps finally into the belly of the beast, looking outwards from within the crowd