The exhibition No story is an island, presented at Caudan Arts Centre last month, was tonto sharpen awareness of historical truths. Nirveda Alleck’s art consists in putting her finger on the sensitive points and questioning the audience, without bullying, with humanity…
Dominique Bellier
The title, inspired by John Done’s novel No Man is an Island, tells us that the island is part of a whole, that history is our island, and so is the quest for truth! Since her Continuum series, in which she depicted with almost photographic precision the different generations of people she has met in Mauritius and in the many countries where she has exhibited, this artist has never ceased to speak to us of transmission…
Her more recent research, of which this exhibition is the fruit, plays with colonial island imagery, which she unravels and confronts with contemporary views. Nourished by a residency at the Cité internationale des Arts in Paris and by the Visa pour la création from the Institut français in La Réunion, this work is based on an analysis of human and natural representations from the 19th century: photographs by Désiré Charnay, engravings by Milbert or Bory de Saint-Vincent, landscapes by the painter Adolphe Le Roy…
Alleck places these lush landscapes and bare bodies in a contemporary context to awaken critical minds to the biases of colonial propaganda. She goes back in time to question our present, woven of places charged with other lives and past dramas, of epinal images drawn from official history and our existences made up of appearances and realities, doubts and transcendence…
Detachment
Nirveda Alleck takes full advantage of the urgent need to renew the imagery of slavery, with these powerful, humanistic paintings, featuring admirable technical mastery in the treatment of color, luminosity, drawing and composition. Under the ironic title Voyage à la Rivière des Roches, the nudity of former slaves or indentured laborers from China, Africa or India, photographed in 1863 “for science”, calls out and moves us… What do these apparently enchanting landscapes mean to them? What becomes of them after dehumanization?
In her garden today, how does this lady feel, with her bare back too, who has agreed to take a break next to the stray dogs she cares for? Writer Bertrand d’Espaignet compares her to a new Virginie who has broken the codes of her community, in one of the poems inspired by these paintings.
In the quadriptych L’Héritage, another Virginie, this one from a different period, turns to the silhouettes of Labourdonnais and men in colonial helmets. Impossible love in one direction is realized in the other, next door, with the table couple of a black woman with a white man, taken from a Brazilian print. With 220 years – which separates us from Milbert’s engravings – a young man of today transcends the past and levitates into the dream and ambition of a new Mauritius…
