In a new exhibition that engages with Madagascar’s history, landscape, and cultural memory, French-Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin presents a powerful new body of work at Fondation H in Madagascar. His solo exhibition explores colonial legacies, ancestral knowledge, and spiritual transmission. Created between his studio in Toulouse and Antananarivo, the entirely new works draw deeply on local craftsmanship and context, marking a resonant dialogue between place, memory, and material.
The exhibition Correspondances was born of encounters, notably the artist’s meeting with an island—its landscapes, its artisanal gestures, its colonial history. This project weaves links between France, his country of residence; Benin, his family’s place of origin; and Madagascar, the host land for this exhibition; between the visual archives of the past and contemporary practices of resistance; between the artist’s thought and the making of the works. The title Correspondances acts as a guiding thread. It directly evokes colonial postcards—ambiguous objects, at once intimate and propagandistic—that once circulated between colony and metropole.” Hobisoa Raininoro, Curator at Fondation H
The title Correspondances stands as a key interpretative lens for Roméo Mivekannin’s solo exhibition at Fondation H. For this project, the artist refers to colonial postcards–both intimate and ideological objects–which he critically reappropriates through textile painting. The term Correspondances also evokes echoes between different temporalities, narratives, and gestures of repair, extending to the geographic connections between France, Benin, and Madagascar—between colonial pasts and contemporary resistances, between erased figures and their reinsertion into an active memory. The exhibition thus becomes a site for dialogue between narratives, memories, and gestures of repair. Correspondances embodies a weaving of multiple voices/visions/hands: between archives and new creations, between continents and insularities, between artistic gestures and artisanal ones, between the absent and the living.
For this exhibition, the artist presents two series of works. The first textile serie, La mémoire, l’écriture, l’archive [Memory, Writing, Archive], consists of paintings on sewn sheets infused with an elixir of his own making, inspired by colonial postcards and embellished with embroidery by Malagasy craftswomen. The second, Fahatsiarovana [Remembrance], takes the form of a monumental 20-meter-long installation created in collaboration with Malagasy metalworkers. It depicts asens–portable Voodoo altars–in dialogue with Malagasy funeral relics and steles. All the works on view–presented here for the first time–were produced between the artist’s studio in Toulouse and Antananarivo, drawing on local artisanal expertise.
Fondation H
Fondation H is a Malagasy contemporary art foundation. It was founded in Antananarivo in 2017 on the initiative of entrepreneur and patron Hassanein Hiridjee, who believed that art and culture have a strong social impact and enable a critical opening to the world. It has been recognised as a public utility since 2018. Fondation H operates programmes dedicated to supporting artists from Africa and its diasporas in their careers, facilitates public access to art, and actively participates in the development and structuring of the art scene in the Indian Ocean.
Roméo Mivekannin Correspondances is on view at Fondation H in Madagascar from 2nd October, 2025 until 21st March, 2026.
