Connecting people through art 

We are glad to announce, in collaboration with MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, UNAM), the presentation of the moving-image project Our Listenings (Nuestras Escuchas) by Guadeloupean artist Minia Biabiany.
The work was produced as the result of Biabiany winning the Han Nefkens Foundation – Moving Image Commission 2024, focused on the theme of ecology, and realized in collaboration with MUAC, MACBA (Barcelona), and The Bass (Miami). Following its presentation in Mexico City, the project will be presented at the other two partner institutions. 

To mark the opening, a Masterclass by Han Nefkens will take place on September 2, at 5pm, followed by an Artist Talk with Minia Biabiany, director Tatiana Cuevas and curator Virginia Roy Luzarraga on September 5, 2026, at 12pm, offering deeper insights into the collaborative methodology and ecological themes behind the commission.

Our Listenings marks a significant shift in Biabiany’s practice toward collective creation. Bringing together close relatives—educators, a scientist, a permaculture practitioner, and an eight-year-old girl—the project transforms collective listening into a poetic and political practice of presence. Together, they explore their shared relationship to water in Guadeloupe, a territory deeply affected by chlordecone contamination used on banana plantations between the 1970s and 1990s, as well as ongoing colonial structures.

Far from an abstract ecological concern, water emerges as a lived political condition that shapes domestic rhythms, emotional states, and collective memory. 

In the exhibition, the video installation is accompanied by six burned-wood sculptures shaped like female sperm whales, a marine species native to Guadeloupe yet largely absent from the local collective imaginary.

Inspired by the echolocation of these cetaceans and the writings of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Biabiany turns sound waves and whale dialects into a poetic methodology: deep listening and the ocean as pathways to resist the historical asphyxiation of slavery and capitalist extractivism. Within the work, the sea emerges as a protagonist bearing witness to history and foreign domination, exposing its own contamination while preserving ritual customs and ancestral knowledge.