Artist Anna Binta Diallo reframes maps and memory.

PHOTO: Detail shot of Sediments and sky in Topographies by Anna Binta Diallo. Amanda Erickson/The Griff.

From May 24 to Aug. 8, MacEwan’s Mitchell Art Gallery is transformed into a world of layered topographies and kaleidoscopic landscapes in Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light, an exhibition by Franco-Manitoban and Senegalese artist Anna Binta Diallo. Drawing from discarded university maps, Diallo reimagines traditional forms of navigation to explore colonial histories, diasporic identity, and how people relate to land and place. 

“With Anna’s work, there is kind of this refusal of flatness,” says gallery curator Carolyn Jervis. The experience of viewing a map is tactile and possessive, Jervis explains. It’s something you can hold in your hands, look down at, and capture the entirety of the world. 

Jervis explains that the age of enlightenment idea of mastery over a place is challenged through the exhibit. “There is no mastery that you’re allowed in looking at any of these reimagined maps,” she says.

Jervis has been the curator of the Mitchell since it opened in 2017. Building the Mitchell from the ground up has allowed her to take a very hands-on role with the gallery and the artists who come through it. According to Jervis, a large goal of the gallery is to broaden opportunities for students. Whether that be through volunteering at the gallery, interning, or conducting a practicum study at the Mitchell, Jervis says that witnessing students and artists connect is an exciting experience. 

As student-focused as the Mitchell is, it also has room for artists outside the MacEwan community to host exhibitions. 

“I was really interested to work with Anna Binta because of her deep thinking about history and materials,” says Jervis. “And because there is something so aesthetically satisfying, too, about the way in which she can take these really complex ideas and provide these interpretive opportunities for people.”

Diallo’s work, sprawling across the gallery in collages, cut-outs, and illuminated layers, resists a singular interpretation. One of the centrepiece works — a circular composition of purples, reds, and blues — inspired the show’s title. 

“They reminded me of mountains and valleys,” Diallo says, “Some of the cutting out that I did, and then I layered it upon our own images of the sun or a kind of sky. There’s so much time and there’s so much depth to the planet and the cosmos and our time here. So, that’s kind of what the title evokes.”

Exhibiting in an academic space like MacEwan adds a layer of resonance to the works. The maps came from another university and were returned to MacEwan during their stay at the Mitchell. Diallo says she aimed to reference the maps without making one herself — a task that proved difficult. Maps function as a historical record, but in her work with them, Diallo discovered they are also very abstract and artistic. 

To craft these works, Diallo carefully selected fragments of the maps to build new geographies. “You’ll rarely see a whole place on the map,” she says. “You’ll see more like snippets of spaces or places. And that was done on purpose.” The resulting compositions blur the line between documentation and imagination, leaving room for audience contemplation and contradiction of historical and colonial perspectives. 

For students and gallerygoers encountering Diallo’s work for the first time, she hopes the experience will spark curiosity. “I hope people would walk away thinking more about, like, their place, our place, on the land, but also the history behind it.”