Mallory Lowe Mpoka - Les mains bleuies
du 20 mars au 6 juin 2025 - Maison Gacha, Paris, France
Indigo weaves stories-between memory and material, between heritage and resurgence. Through a selection of textiles - ndop from Cameroon, Adire Eleko and Ukara from Nigeria, Dogon cloth from Mali, Dan Fani from Burkina Faso - this exhibition traces the entwined journeys of this dye plant. Once a driver of colonial economies, indigo is also a living archive, imbued with the gestures of those who cultivated, preserved, and defended it.
For Les mains bleuies Mallory Lowe Mpoka presents a newly created textile piece, specifically made for this exhibition and part of their ongoing research project on indigo (2022-on going). Through weaving, the artist expands their exploration of this material and its multiple dimensions-historical, symbolic, and political. Indigo of exploitation, indigo of transmission: between collective memory and artisanal gesture, Mpoka questions the traces left by this color and the struggles that shape it. At once a colonial imprint and a contemporary reclaiming, indigo here becomes a space of repair, transmission, and reinvention.
