Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)

Taking its title from Saint-John Perse’s 1942 poem, Exile, written during the French poet and Nobel laureate’s years of exile in the United States, Porteurs de feu draws inspiration from the line, “We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities.” For Mivekannin, exile is not an end, but a condition that compels one to carry. Fire becomes language, memory, music, painting – that which survives displacement and can be transmitted across places and generations. To “sow cities” is to create new imaginaries, reflecting the role that artists and thinkers have played in continually making and remaking the places in which they live.

Having long turned to the European art historical canon as a site of interrogation and revision, in this body of work, Mivekannin expands his field of reference to artists who have shaped his understanding of New York and American cultural life. Moving between immigrants and their descendants, Black American artists, and figures whose work engages questions of migration, race, displacement, and belonging, he enters into dialogue with David Hammons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Nona Faustine, Kerry James Marshall, Emanuel Leutze, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and John White Alexander, among others. Together, these references construct an image of America shaped not by a singular lineage, but through intersecting histories of movement, struggle, cultural exchange, and reinvention as a means of survival.

Mivekannin reinterprets well-known works and iconic images, inserting his own likeness into their compositions to explore artistic inheritance and the ways histories are continually rewritten. The source material becomes a means of reconsidering migration, visibility, and privilege through images embedded in the cultural imagination. In Homer’s The Gulf Stream, a Black man survives alone amid an unforgiving sea. Mivekannin replaces the storm with the expanse of the night sky; where Homer paints chaos and danger, his figure lies at rest, unafraid beneath the stars. Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware offers another image of passage, but one monumentalized as a founding myth, which Mivekannin describes as “the crossing that is glorified.” He answers it with what he calls “the other crossing” – the one without a flag, without a hero; the one that goes unnamed.

Elsewhere, Lunch atop a Skyscraper becomes an image of the invisible labor on which New York was built. Mivekannin draws a line between the migrant body subjected to inspection on arrival and the bodies that would go on to construct the city: “At Ellis Island, bodies were inspected. Here, the sky is built.”

Rest, too, is political. The bourgeois repose of John White Alexander is reimagined as a Black body floating beyond the confines of the domestic interior: “In my version, rest has no walls.” Kerry James Marshall’s reclining Black figure offers another proposition – “rest that no longer needs permission” – turning leisure from a marker of privilege into an assertion of presence.

Mivekannin’s revisionist interventions are not merely self-portraits. He describes his own recurring image as “an element of transference,” a body through which another history might be inhabited and reconsidered. By placing himself within compositions from which Black bodies have historically been absent, marginalized, anonymized, or subjected to the gaze of others, he shifts the terms of representation. As he reflects, “To shift the gaze of others, one must first accept putting oneself on the line.”

The black velvet on which these figures emerge intensifies the tension between visibility and disappearance. A difficult material to work with, it absorbs both color and light, allowing bodies to hover between presence and obscurity. This material language extends Mivekannin’s broader practice, in which old bedsheets – often sourced from French wedding trousseaux – are steeped in restorative elixir baths used in Vodou rites originating in the historic Kingdom of Dahomey. Like shrouds, these fabrics carry the traces of other lives. Through painting, ritual and transformation, Mivekannin seeks to make present those whom history has obscured.

Presented in dialogue with the new paintings, The Souls of Black Folk extends these questions across more than a century of Black thought, creativity, and resistance. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’s landmark 1903 publication, the installation comprises portraits of Black political leaders, writers, artists, musicians, and activists spanning generations, geographies, and ideological positions, each paired with layered excerpts from Du Bois’s text. Writing of the “double consciousness” produced by racism in the United States, Du Bois describes how “One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”[1] (#_ftn1) Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Mivekannin’s installation gathers figures whose differing positions and contributions attest to the continuing struggle over how Black histories are lived, represented, and remembered.

Du Bois and Perse offer two interconnected points of departure. For Mivekannin, Du Bois names the wound of double consciousness and histories that have been silenced, while Perse gives voice to the momentum of those who keep moving forward through the darkness. Between them runs a thread: the capacity to carry history without being reduced to it. In the artist’s words, “Each portrait tells the story of the journey: exile, loss, the human condition, but also the human genius to transcend reality through creation.”

Coinciding with Mivekannin’s first visit to New York, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)emerges from a city that previously only existed for him through the works of others. It is a New York at once real and imagined: a place made and remade through artistic invention, political struggle, and the people who have arrived from elsewhere. Conceived amid renewed debates around migration and belonging, the exhibition affirms artistic creation as a force that defies borders and the semiotics of bureaucracy. To carry fire is not to romanticize exile or the conditions that produce it. It is to insist on what can be made in spite of them: to carry what survives, to transmit it, and to create something from which others might begin.

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[1] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903), 3.


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