L’Allée de la Reine an installation of a series of sculptures in wood by Diagne Chanel, displayed at the Dakar City Hall garden, during the Dak’Art Biennale (May/June, 2016).
Diane Chanel is a painter and sculptor. Her work addresses the political and social problems of the African continent. Diagne Chanel studied art at Ecole Nationale des Arts Décoratifs and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués. She is French and Senegalese.
For the past 10 years, Diagne Chanel has been developing intercultural themes that compose French society, with exhibitions in several major international museums and two children’s books published by Paris Musées.
She is based in Paris and Sédhiou in Casamance/Senegal where she had started an amazing new project working with local craft makers to produce a series of large sculptures in wood. At the same time, using photography, she is engaging a dialogue between the Black Body and the colonial architecture / Italian Renaissance Style. A unique dialogue she has been exploring for several years in Florence, Paris and Sédhiou.
Among other previous works Diagne Chanel looked at genocide and slave trade: «A Season in the South Sudan» based on the genocide and enslavement of the Black African populations of Southern Sudan from 1956 to our time in 2006, and «No Spring for Geronimo», on the victims of the trans-Saharan slave trade.
From history to tomorrow, from imaginary to reality, and vice versa, stressing out the visible and the unseen, Diagne Chanel explores in her work the displacement of black people physically and mentally. She traces the impact of the spatiality of the black body (external, cerebral and experienced) to recreate new territories in terms of aesthetic and politics.
k'a yelema productions 