YOUNG EUROPEAN ARTISTS

Anna Safiatou Touré, born in Bamako in 1996, is a multidisciplinary Franco-Malian artist based in Brussels. Her work explores narratives related to migration, cultural heritage, and the mechanisms of collective memory. Using photography, installation, video games, and performance art, she invites us to take a fresh look at the lesser-known aspects of history, questioning what remains hidden, missing, or erased in official historical documents.

After studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Nantes and ENSAV La Cambre (Master's in Photography, Brussels), Touré has positioned herself among contemporary artists who examine individual memory, the colonial past, and the construction of historical narratives. Her approach, characterized by a certain narrative tension, evokes contemporary practices, notably those of Lydia Ourahmane, who addresses the physical dimension and migration through sculpture, video, and sound, and Myriam Mihindou, for whom memory and migratory movements are transformed into performative structures linked to the body and the environment.

Touré's work is marked by a poetic approach to emptiness and absence: through her photographic series, she recreates imaginary archives or revisits decontextualized cultural artifacts, highlighting issues of representation and domination present in European ethnographic collections. In her work “Herbier du département congolais des Serres royales de Laeken” (Herbarium of the Congolese Department of the Royal Greenhouses of Laeken), she imagines and recreates a herbarium linked to the botanical heritage of Laeken's colonial period, emphasizing the disappearance or concealment of species and historical knowledge.

With “The Faces Collection,” an installation composed of miniature clay mask impressions, Touré offers a critical analysis of African cultural objects displayed in European museums. Through this formal approach—which reveals only the mark of their absence—she demonstrates the sacralization of objects perceived as exotic and the way in which these artifacts have been removed from their original cultural environments to become frozen representations in Western cultural institutions.

Her project “Gamanké Museum” addresses this similar issue through an innovative multimedia format: starting with masks made for tourism and intended for a Western audience, Touré uses video games to challenge museum conventions and offer different narratives, incorporating an invented language inspired by Bambara and Sonrhai.

Through her delicate approach, which is both conceptual and poetic, Anna Safiatou Touré develops an in-depth reflection on migration, mixed cultural identities, and transnational exchanges of historical narratives. Her work is currently being shown in group exhibitions in Europe (Kanal-Centre Pompidou, FOMU, ISELP) and internationally. She has also received awards and funding, such as the Prix Médiatine and the Fonds Roger de Conynck.