Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire)

The exhibition traces two interconnected narratives through a new body of paintings on black velvet and an extensive portrait installation, examining how cultural memory is shaped through migration, representation, and acts of historical repair. The paintings pay tribute to the immigrant artists who helped define New York's creative landscape, while The Souls of Black Folk, an immersive installation inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois's landmark 1903 publication, is dedicated to the political leaders, intellectuals, and artists whose lives and legacies continue to inform Black history.

Taking its title from Saint-John Perse's Exile (1942), written during the French poet and Nobel laureate's years of exile in the United States, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) draws inspiration from the line, "We, bearers of fire, we, sowers of cities." For Mivekannin, these "bearers of fire" are the artists who arrived in New York from elsewhere: immigrants, refugees, and exiles whose creative labor transformed the city into one of the world's great cultural capitals.

Marking a significant evolution in his practice, the series extends Mivekannin's longstanding engagement with the European art historical canon to the immigrant artists and intellectuals whose contributions have profoundly influenced American cultural life. Having never visited New York himself, Mivekannin pays tribute not to the city as it exists, but to one encountered through their works. Conceived amid renewed debates around migration and belonging, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) affirms artistic creation as a force that defies borders.

As the artist states:

Each portrait tells the story of the journey: exile, loss, the human condition, but also the human genius to transcend reality through creation.

The series pays tribute to artists who have profoundly influenced Mivekannin's own practice, including David Hammons, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Nicole Eisenman, Nona Faustine, James McNeill Whistler, and John Singer Sargent. Continuing his engagement with the Western canon, he reinterprets their works while inserting his own likeness into their compositions, exploring artistic inheritance and the ways histories are continually rewritten. Executed on black velvet, the paintings extend his investigation into portraiture as a site of historical revision.

Presented alongside this new body of work is The Souls of Black Folk, a monumental installation inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois's seminal 1903 book of the same name, a foundational text of the early Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States and a landmark in the global struggle for racial equality. The installation brings together portraits of Black politicians, writers, artists, musicians, and activists — including Josephine Baker, Malcolm X, Wole Soyinka, Édouard Glissant, Alicia Keys, and Kamala Harris — each paired with pages from Du Bois's publication. Suspended in a dense installation and occupying an entire room of the Tribeca gallery, the portraits form a constellation of voices whose lives span continents, generations, and political movements, charting more than a century of Black thought, creativity, and resistance.

Rather than presenting a singular historical narrative, Mivekannin brings together individuals whose contributions to racial justice took many different forms, transforming the gallery into a living archive where remembrance becomes an active, collective process.

Across both bodies of work, Mivekannin examines the politics of representation. Drawing on photographic archives and canonical works of European painting, he interrogates the ways Black figures have been anonymized, eroticized, marginalized, or excluded within the Western artistic tradition. By repeatedly inserting his own portrait into these inherited images, he disrupts established narratives while reclaiming a space of visibility from which Black bodies have historically been excluded. His paintings become acts of both critique and repair.

Together, Porteurs de feu (Bearers of Fire) and The Souls of Black Folk reveal portraiture as more than a means of representation. For Mivekannin, it becomes an act of remembrance, resistance, and historical repair — one that reclaims overlooked lives while asking how cultural memory is continually shaped, revised, and carried forward.