Roxane Mbanga France / Cameroun / Guadeloupe, b. 1996

Roxane Mbanga (Paris, 1996) is a Guadeloupean, Cameroonian, and French multidisciplinary artist based in Paris. Working across installation, film, photography, textile, writing, and performance, she treats the body as a site of knowledge: the body that feels before it understands, the body that carries what has never been spoken.

 

Her work is collaborative in nature and often emerges through research and fieldwork. It is grounded in a practice of remémoration [remembrance]: returning the marginalized to the center, making visible what was rendered absent, and reconnecting what colonial rupture separated. Her practice invokes silent inheritances, gestures, memories, and forms of knowledge transmitted across generations.

 

Since 2021, NOIRES has been her central ongoing work. Conceived as an imagined home reconstructed room by room within exhibition spaces, NOIRES gathers the voices of women navigating plural heritages between Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. Its different chapters — Le Salon, Le Balcon, La Rue, La Salle de Bain, La Salle à Manger, La Terrasse — have been presented at 193 Gallery in Paris, Maison des Mondes Africains in Paris, Fondation H in Paris, San Mei Gallery in London, and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. With each new iteration, NOIRES expands, refusing institutional or geographic containment.

 

Awarded the Lichting Prize and Rietveld Reviewed Prize in 2021, Mbanga has received support from CNAP (French National Centre for Visual Arts), Arts Council England, and Fluxus. Her work has been exhibited in institutions across France and internationally, including La Passerelle Art Center in Brest, Stewart Hall Gallery in Montreal, the National Museum of Cameroon, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.