Roméo Mivekannin

Born in 1986 in Bouaké (Ivory Coast), multidisciplinary artist Roméo Mivekannin lives and works between Toulouse (France) and Cotonou (Benin). After training as a cabinetmaker and studying art history, Mivekannin enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Toulouse, where he experimented with media ranging from sculpture to painting. Following his studies, he devoted himself to his work as a visual artist while beginning a thesis spanning art history, sociology, and architecture. He is currently pursuing a doctorate in art and architecture at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Montpellier.

Mivekannin works at the crossroads of inherited tradition and the contemporary world, situating his work within an ancestral temporality and developing his own rituals, which echo the Vodun cosmology that remains deeply rooted in Benin. Moving between painting, sculpture, and installation, his practice is multidisciplinary and ambitious. He experiments with materials and challenges established boundaries between disciplines, enacting a formal and symbolic defiance that is distinctly his own.

With strength and subtlety, Mivekannin unravels the threads of our confinement a little more each time, thus questioning our collective and intimate heritage. The artist’s works propose a form of strategic resistance that fuses critical engagement with emotion.

Recent solo exhibitions and institutional highlights include Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) at Southern Guild, New York (2026); Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris (November 2026); Les gens ne disent presque rien at Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany (2025); Correspondances at Fondation H, Antananarivo, Madagascar (2025); Black Mirror at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2025); and L'Envers de l'Histoire at Louvre-Lens, France (2024). His work has also been featured in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz MOCAA (Cape Town, South Africa), Kunstmuseum Basel (Switzerland), Bozar (Brussels, Belgium), and Liljevalchs (Stockholm, Sweden).

His work is held in numerous public and private collections, including CCS Bard (New York), Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), Cité de la Musique (Paris), Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia), Currier Museum of Art (New Hampshire), Fondation H (Antananarivo), Galerie Nationale d’Art Contemporain du Bénin (Cotonou), Kunstmuseum Basel, Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac (Paris), Musée des Abattoirs (Toulouse), Sharjah Art Foundation, and the VERBUND Collection (Vienna), among others.