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“Mémoire Matérielle”: Can Materials Hold Memory?
Mémoire Matérielle”: Can Materials Hold Memory? The exhibition at 193 Gallery in Paris rethinks memory as a material process through works that explore preservation, repair, transmission and colonial afterlives.
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Spread across three interconnecting rooms on the ground floor of 193 Gallery, Mémoire Matérielle brings together four artists—Gaëlle Choisne, Joana Choumali, Andile Dyalvane and Carla Gueye—and opens with a dialogue between the works of Choisne and Choumali.
Choumali’s series Alba’hian—meaning the first light of day in the Anyin language—is an amalgam of delicately embroidered photographs in which sheer voile, gold and figures merge into the soft light of dawn. As with much of Choumali’s work, these pieces are built from what began as ordinary photographs of landscapes, silhouettes and streets, collected mostly in Abidjan, where the artist is based. Layered with embroidery, however, these fleeting moments become a delicate, tactile surface that lures you in with some semblance of the seen only to leave you inside a rêverie.
How can the hand bear witness to histories and heritages that have been displaced or erased? That is the curatorial proposition, a challenge taken up by Azu Nwagbogu and Nkhensani Mkhari, curators of Mémoire Matérielle. Taking its cue from the gallery’s reading of the writer Paulette Nardal’s proposition that consciousness does not simply pass from one generation to the next, the exhibition focuses on how the hand can become a primary instrument for the reconstruction of a common whole, across practices that involve clay, textile, image, surface and assemblage. But if anything, the exhibition reads more like a series of shows within a show.
The exhibition climaxes with an expansive skylit room given over to Choisne’s Zantray series. Named after the Haitian Creole, zantray, meaning “entrails” or “innards”, these installations—sitting at the frontier of painting, sculpture and relief—riff on the body in its marked, wounded state.
In Zantray I, a metal grid holds a mass of acrylic resin against the wall, a kind of ritual magma. Memory here is of the flesh. Like skin, the surfaces are imperfect: uneven in tone, scabbed in places, by turns rough and glossy. A painting given an entire wall to itself immerses us further in Choisne’s use of ceramic and mixed-media materials, and draws our gaze up towards the ceiling. The light itself falls most directly on Andile Dyalvane’s iSiduli (Anthill) standing on a white plinth at the centre of the room. The mid-sized sculpture is made of a round green base that narrows into a ridged neck, then swells into an ochre dome pierced by a small opening, with two branches twisting up on both sides like horns.
Before clay becomes a vessel, sculpture or form, it is earth, gathered slowly beneath our feet through erosion, sediment and water. In this sense, clay is not simply a medium but a common ground, an ancestral matter that keeps us connected to past generations and cultures, and a metaphor for returning to oneself. If memory can at first seem fractured, these gathered artefacts, which, like clay, precede borders and disciplines, reconstruct a world of buried emotions. In a separate enclave, Carla Gueye’s new sculptures offer one of the clearest demonstrations of this idea.
Gueye has long explored the female figure and the workings of remembrance, drawing on processes of excavation and reclamation. As clay remembers, so do our bodies. In As I Am—two slabs of lime, wood, jute and metal hung one above the other, with a figure appearing upside down and cut in two at the waist across them—the body becomes an archive: a place where experience is re-inscribed and understood, shaped by encounters and passed on through gesture.
Rather than simply recovering these silenced histories and techniques, Gueye’s work with lime—traditionally used to coat and protect house walls in the Charente, where she grew up—draws on methods learned from her father to create her own visual language, treating the past not as something to be preserved or reconstructed but as a living material through which new artistic forms can emerge.
While Mémoire Matérielle shows the composite forms memory can take, what makes the exhibition particularly compelling is how differently each artist approaches the subject. It is a distinct experience, one that asks us to weigh the complex stories lying between making and recollecting, threading together the individual and the collective.
Mémoire Matérielle is on view at 193 Gallery, 24 rue Béranger, 75003 Paris, from 5 September to 31 October 2026.
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