A hyper-realist, abstract visual artist born in Nouakchott, Saleh Lo has exhibited in various solo and group exhibitions in Nouakchott, Tunisia, Barcelona and Paris. In 2017, he completed an artist-in-residency program with Raw Material Company in Dakar (Senegal), where he learned about new experimental tools, as well as different artistic and curatorial techniques. After participating in an artistic residency with Schlesische 27 in Berlin, he was named a representative of the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA) in Mauritania. In an artistic residency at the Clark

House Initiative in Mumbai (India) from 2017 to 2018, he grew concerned with discrimination based on the caste system, and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, in 2019, he devoted his work to the topic of immigration. He also held exhibitions at the Dakar Biennale in 2018, the Mauritanian pavilion of the Dubai 2020 World Expo (UAE) and Partcours, in Dakar, in 2021. Collaborating with photographer Malika Diagana, he is a founder and the art director of D’art Espace des Créations in Nouakchott, which works to further artistic and cultural promotion.

His art is often based on researching the subjects and people he portrays, using photography and video as sources of documentation and inspiration. With the intention of pointing out the complexity in terms of identity and the inner brokenness of the people portrayed, the works often appear somehow unfinished, with parts of the canvas or sketch uncovered. Highlighting his owned mixed-race ancestry, another of the author’s favorite subjects is Mauritania’s cultural admixtures. Métissage 1 and Métissage 2 form part of a series on this issue, begun in 2020 during his artist-in-residency program in Rome (Italy). They show a Mauritanian boy and girl, Mamadou and Eye, of differing mixed ancestry, to display the complexity of contemporary Mauritanian society and, more generally, of the whole world.

Born in the city of Rosso, in southwestern Mauritania, he is one of the country’s first painters. Known by the name of Mokhis, he trained with Denis Reed, an artist of Canadian origin, in the 1970s. Throughout his lengthy career, he has exhibited in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Morocco, Libya and Tunisia. In 2008, he held the exhibition Regards sur le passé (Looks at the Past) on the history of modern Mauritania, and in 2019 he produced several canvases for the United Nations

Population Fund (UNFPA) in which he bears witness to child mortality, the violence perpetrated against women and female genital mutilation. On several occasions he has served as President of the Union des Artistes Peintres de Mauritanie (UAPM) and the Maison des Artistes de Mauritanie, as well as collaborating as an illustrator on the work Al-Fan al-tashkili al-mu’asir fi Muritaniyya (The Contemporary Plastic Art of Mauritania), by Mauritanian historian Torba Omar, which was published by the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALECSO) in 2021. His work often consists of deconstructed images of animals, people and

architectural elements intermixed with symbols of Arab-Berber craftsmanship and Tifinagh script. Among the themes inspiring his extensive work are those of a social nature, Arab-Berber cultural heritage and the historical memory of Mauritania and the Maghreb region. Two of his most recent works, La joconde du désert - Methe Mint Ababe, and Ould M’seika, allude to two figures from Mauritania’s collective memory who lived during the French colonial period: a woman praised for her great beauty and generosity and a controversial figure who is remembered as a hero or a

criminal by different communities, as a result of his prowess, skills and criminal acts attributed to him.

A visual artist born in Nouakchott, she began painting in 1999. Then in 2004, she exhibited for the first time at the National Museum of Mauritania. A promoter of artistic creation in her native country, Amy Sow is the founder and director of the Art Gallé (“Come Home” in the Pulaar language) exhibition and residency space founded in Nouakchott in 2007, and vice-president of the M-Art collective for the promotion of Mauritanian art. She has put on exhibitions in France, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, the United States and Spain, and has taken part in the Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar (Senegal), as well as exhibiting in other countries. Her international presence grew stronger after helping design the costumes for the film Timbuktu (2014), directed by Abderrahmane Sissako and nominated for the Oscar Awards and Cannes Film Festival. In 2019, New African magazine selected Amy Sow as one of the hundred most important African personalities of the time. Somewhere between figurative and abstract, her artistic production is expressed through photography, installations, performance art, sculpture and acrylic painting. Her work is meant to be a means for reflection and catalyst for social change. It is acknowledged for its examination of womanhood. In 2020, she created the project L’art de lutter contre les violences faites aux femmes et aux enfants (The art of fighting against violence against women and children), a platform that uses various artistic media, including a bus painted with colorful graffiti that travels the country to raise awareness about the issue of systemic violence against women and children. In her latest project, Au fil de l’eau (By the flow of water), presented at Art Gallé in 2021, she uses photography, installations, performance art and storytelling to address the problem of water scarcity and the difficulty of access to water, denouncing the burden which this places on women in their everyday lives.

A visual artist born in Mederda, in southwestern Mauritania, at the age of nine he moved to Dakar (Senegal), where he made his initial contact with the plastic arts during his frequent visits to the workshops of local artists. He returned to Mauritania in 1988 and settled in the capital, where he became a student of Brahim Fall, one of Mauritania’s pioneering painters, trained at the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs, directed by Senegalese painter Papa Ibra Tall, in Thiès (Senegal). In 2001, he held an exhibition for the first time at the Centre Culturel Français in

Nouakchott (now the Institut Français de Mauritanie), and in subsequent years he took part in group and solo exhibitions at the National Museum, the Centre CulturelFrançais and the Centre Culturel Marocain in Nouakchott. In 2014, he won first prize in the painting competition held by the Union des Artistes Peintres de Mauritanie (UAPM) and the European Union. Two years later, in 2016, he participated in the DeafNet Africa Conference in Johannesburg (South Africa), which works for the empowerment of deaf-mute people in Africa. From 2017 to 2021, he held group and solo exhibitions at the Zeinart Gallery in Nouakchott. A member of the former Maison des Sourds in Nouakchott, he currently teaches Plastic Arts to children with disabilities at the Centre Commercial des Sourds. His work, between figurative and abstract, is defined by snippet images placed in a colorful patchwork, in the style of the Thiès school. In them he weaves together intense colors and pastels while playing with perception. His most recent paintings, like Fishing Woman, were produced in acrylic and illustrate his memories of scenes with animals and people, which the artist observed or imagined at the artisanal fishing port of Nouakchott. They also focus on the relationship between the sea and humans, and man’s impact on maritime resources.

Born in Paris, Moussa Abdallah Sissako, better known by the pseudonym “Afroriginal,” is a singer, slammer (theatrical poetry performer) and stage director living in Nouakchott, Mauritania. A versatile artist, he performs in different musical styles, ranging from dancehall to electronic music. He has participated in different projects like Original Slam and Tout feu, tout slam, both under the EMI Music label. In 2010, he signed on to the company L’âme orale de l’histoire, for a show written and directed by Nebil Baghsen and Laura Couturier, and performed at the Parisian theater La Reine Blanche. Moving between Paris and Nouakchott, he collaborates with Blackk Shadow and Oliver DrumDreamers on the Ti Boss project, including both hip-hop and reggae, resulting in an EP released in 2015. That same year, he released the album DBFam, which was accompanied by different music videos, with his hip-hop group Dream Big Family. In 2017, he produced the soundtrack for the show “Les actes du désert - 180°” by choreographer and dancer Smaïl Kanouté, put on by the Compagnie Vivons and performed many times in France throughout 2018. He then took part in creating the soundtrack for a multimedia project surrounding the graphic novel “Au pied de la falaise” (“At the Foot of the Seacliff”) by the cartoonist Mökö. It was published by Éditions Noctambule in 2017. Since 2020, he has been cooperating with Mauritanian choreographer and dancer Pap Klé Fall to re-adapt his first stage direction experience, “Paroles d’un prosopis” (“Words of a Carob Tree). Conceptualized as of 2014, this piece was presented in the form of a musical tale mixing visual projections, Chinese shadows, dance, slam (performance poetry) and hiphop, and in 2016 at the Institut Français de

Mauritanie, with the collaboration of the M-Art collective for the promotion of Mauritanian art and various international artists, including Emannuelle Hiron and Daouda Corera, who in 2017 exhibited watercolors and photographs made for the project at the same institution.