Myriam Mihindou – Lève le doigt quand tu parles, 2024

Through performances, drawings, photographs, installations and videos, Myriam Mihindou’s practice claims to be both therapeutic and spiritual, as well as social and political. Inspired by places she has travelled through, and communities she has met on her travels, her work aims to give visibility and an audience to bodies, voices and imaginations that have long been neglected or minoritised. Through it, she seeks to heal the individual and collective wounds caused by various forms of oppression and domination.

At the entrance to the huge halls, on a floor made of metal frames and perched on concrete rebar rods, women’s arms stretch out and fingers point upwards. Pointing, demanding, pleading, or rising up in protest: this collective gesture cultivates ambiguity. Lève le doigt quand tu parles (“Put your hand up when you speak”) is a performative, physical work that is symbolically ambivalent. Created by casting the forearms of twenty women from different generations, it traces by their unique destinies. It references women’s rights in our contemporary societies — from silence to rebellion. It is also inspired by the history of the old railway factories — a place where locomotives were repaired and also the scene of social and trade union struggles — in that it evokes notions of resilience and care as well as recalling the claims and grievances of the past.