Born in 1986 in Bouaké (Ivory Coast), Roméo Mivekannin lives and works between Toulouse (France) and Cotonou (Benin). After training as a cabinetmaker and studying art history, Mivekannin chose to enter the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Toulouse. In parallel to his studies, he began to develop his personal practice, experimenting with several media. A key aspect of his work today is upsetting the boundary between materials, for example working first in black acrylic paint and then tinting the canvas so that it appears more like an old photograph.

Mivekannin works both as a painter and sculptor, exploring the crossroads where his ancestral culture meets Western art history and the contemporary world. His disturbing images draw inspiration from early colonial photographs and iconic European paintings such as Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (itself based on Goya’s The Third of May 1808). By substituting his own portrait for those represented in the original works, Mivekannin reinserts the black figure into these earlier visual cultures from which they were large excluded. He is particularly interested in the way that black figures are sources of both fascination and fear, often anonymised and treated like objects for Europeans – especially European men – to gaze upon.

Nevertheless, he is also keen to represent a more positive view of what the relationship between Africa and the West could be. As he said in a recent interview,

 “…the question of black and white is not one which always has to come back to opposition or power struggle, but sometimes these are colours that complement each other. For example, in the game of chess…both colours in fact have a tremendous strength and power. But it takes both to create the cohesion of the world.”