Hamedine Kane

Hamedine Kane (Mauritania, 1983) is a Senegalese artist and filmmaker living between Dakar, Brussels and Paris. His work focuses on exile, wandering, heritage and the awareness that comes with the post-independence political experiences of certain African countries. He questions their recent history, particularly that of Senegal, and reflects its upheavals and aspirations around the notions of Afro-nostalgia and Afro-utopia. Hamedine Kane is also interested in the influence of African, African-American and Afro-diasporic literature on political, social and environmental commitments. Hamedine Kane has recently taken part in numerous festivals and biennales in France and abroad, including the Dakar and Berlin Biennales in 2022, the Momenta Biennale in 2021, the Taipei Biennale in 2020, and numerous exhibitions as part of the Africa2020 season in France.

At Villa Médicis, Hamedine Kane is developing a research project on three major black American writers exiled in Paris in the second half of the 1940s: Richard Wright, Chester Himes and James Baldwin. Her project takes the form of a speculative inquiry into “situated knowledge”, and draws on the testimonies of researchers, literary critics, publishers, historians, theorists, geographers, city specialists, tourist guides and hoteliers alike, as well as residents and tenants of places to live and party. Following what the anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “the art of observing”, this composition of witnesses will form the basis of a work in which Hamedine Kane will enhance the narratives of the so-called protest novel specific to the three writers, attentive to the experience of violence lived and suffered and the refusal of designation that are expressed in their works.