Michaëlle Sergile is an independent artist and curator working mainly on archives including texts and works from the postcolonial period from 1950 to today. Her artistic work aims to understand and rewrite the history of Black communities, and more specifically of women, or communities living in diverse intersections, through weaving. Often perceived as a medium of craftsmanship and categorized as feminine, the artist uses the lexicon of weaving to question the relationships of gender and race.

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She has recently exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Off Biennale de Dakar. Her name was also on the long list of the prestigious Sobey Award for the Arts in 2022. In 2023, she won Visual Artist of the Year at the Gala Dynastie and began a residency at the Darling Foundry. She will exhibit her work at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto and the McCord Stewart Museum in 2024.

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She already has several international exhibitions to her credit, including in Brooklyn at ArtHelix Gallery and Hausen Gallery, in Miami at Aqua Art Fair and in Dakar for the Off Biennale de Dakar.

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Art Practice​

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Interested in rewriting history through weaving, Michaëlle Sergile mainly reworks texts and books on postcolonial theories. Frantz Fanon, often cited as one of the most important authors of postcolonial theories, addressed in 1952, in Black skin, white masks, not only the power relations between colonized and colonizers, but also the relations between the person of colour and their "community". It is through this major work that the codification system took shape allowing the artist to weave books and passages thus questioning cultural identity.

The lexicon of weaving is closely linked to questions of identity. When we weave threads that intersect and form intersections, these are, in a way, discourses that take place. They reflect at times, a cultural mix where the fabric becomes a cross between different cultures. While by others, these threads reflect the intersections of an intersectional thought.

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She also examines the relationship between the writings of authors such as Frantz Fanon, Mayotte Capécia and Félix Mnthali, the place of black women in these postcolonial narratives and cultural identity, and the notion of the “foreigner” through media such as photography, sculpture, the moving image and sound.

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