Roméo Mivekannin’s Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) examines how cultural memory is shaped through migration, representation, and acts of historical repair. Across paintings on black velvet and the expansive portrait installation The Souls of Black Folk, Mivekannin considers the people whose movements, ideas, and labour have shaped the histories they inhabit.
Taking its title from Saint-John Perse’s 1942 poem Exile, the exhibition draws inspiration from the line “We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities.” Portraiture becomes a means of making these histories present: questioning who is remembered, who is made visible, and how their legacies are carried forward. Mivekannin enters into dialogue with David Hammons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kerry James Marshall, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and others, reinterpreting iconic images by inserting his own likeness to explore artistic inheritance and the continual rewriting of history.
Coinciding with Mivekannin’s first visit to New York, the show affirms artistic creation as a force that defies borders—carrying what survives displacement and transmitting it across places and generations.
Southern Guild — New York