Binta Diaw is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy.
2023 year exhibited in Biennial Find out more
Her research is aimed at the creation of installations of various dimensions and works commenting on social phenomena like migration and immigration, notions of identity as well as the Black female body experience.
Defying the Western gaze through a subversive sensibility, her practice questions perceptions of Italianness and Africanness seen as an extended symposium informed by her own cultural heritage and upbringing. Embracing visual art with a strongly intersectional, afro-diasporic and feminist methodology based on a physical personal experience, she is ultimately able to explore the multiple layers of her Blackness, her self as a social body and her position as a Black woman in a Western context.
Recent shows : Bellezza e Terrore: luoghi di colonialismi e fascismi, Museo Madre di Napoli, Napoli (Italy, 2022), The Land of Our Birth is a Woman, Centrale Fies, Dro (Italy, 2022), TooluXeer, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Dakar (Sénégal, 2022), Les tirésailleurs, Bungalow ChertLüdde, Berlin (Germany, 2022), Segni di Me, Casa Testori, Milan (Italy, 2022), The Recovery Plan, devoir de mémoire à l’italienne, InstitutCulturelitalien, Paris (France), A Living Experience of Feeling Listened, Lungomare, Bolzano (Italie, 2021), Nero Sangue, Museo MA*GA, The Recovery Plan, Gallarate (Italy, 2020), Soil is an inscribed body à Savvy Contemporary (Berlin, 2019).
Liverpool Biennial 2023
Chorus of Soil (2023)
Drawing on the artist’s interest in hidden histories and archival material, Binta Diaw’s reimagining of her installation ‘Chorus of Soil’ (2023) uses soil and seeds to map an 18th century plan of the Brooks slave ship. Between 1782 and 1804, the Brooks departed from Liverpool to the West Coast of Africa, carrying over 5000 enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean. Reimagined here on an almost 1:1 scale, the soil and seed plan is accompanied by a new sound work incorporating the voices of local people reciting the poem ‘Zong!’ (2008) by M. NourbeSe Philip. Together, the two elements of this ambitious installation speak to collective acts of mourning, hope, resistance, reparation, care and celebration of ancestral wisdom. The material
Drawing on the artist’s interest in hidden histories and archival material, Binta Diaw’s reimagining of her installation ‘Chorus of Soil’ (2023) uses soil and seeds to map an 18th century plan of the Brooks slave ship. Between 1782 and 1804, the Brooks departed from Liverpool to the West Coast of Africa, carrying over 5000 enslaved people to plantations in the Caribbean. Reimagined here on an almost 1:1 scale, the soil and seed plan is accompanied by a new sound work incorporating the voices of local people reciting the poem ‘Zong!’ (2008) by M. NourbeSe Philip. Together, the two elements of this ambitious installation speak to collective acts of mourning, hope, resistance, reparation, care and celebration of ancestral wisdom. The material used for the installation – soil – speaks to the potential for new life, where new buds can grow, and healing can occur. Diaw references the plantation and the worked ground but transforms the narrative, reclaiming the labour of tending to the ground and reinterpreting it as a productive, fertile space and emancipatory act. Showing at Tobacco Warehouse
Chorus of Soil (2023)
Showing at Tobacco Warehouse
Wednesday - Sunday 10am - 6pm
