Dior Thiam’s artistic practice encompasses painting, installation, and photography, through which she evokes untold stories and problematizes colonial narratives and archives. Born to a Senegalese father and a German mother, the artist questions Eurocentric perspectives through her artworks, drawing on both research and personal experience. By employing aesthetic methods such as fragmentation, layering, and interweaving, Thiam reimagines archival and historical references, creating a space in which emancipatory agencies emerge. In her new work, Tata (2026), Thiam interrogates the historical erasure of French colonial soldiers, reflecting on the experiences of her own grandfather, a Senegalese Tirailleur. Reclaiming the recognition owed to them for their crucial role in liberating Europe from Nazi occupation, Thiam reimagines a monument that confronts the ‘whitening’ that excluded them from official representations, military parades, photographs, and narratives. By addressing the story of the missing memorial to the Tirailleurs in Reims—erected in 1924 and dismantled by the Nazis in 1940—Thiam installs a reproduction of its pedestal, removing the figures and reconceptualizing the void to create a fluid anti-monument. Historical photographs are transferred onto canvas, paying homage to the Tirailleurs as subjects of their own history, meeting the viewer from their own perspective. Cutting, washing, sewing, dyeing, and interlacing the canvas has become Thiam’s transformative practice to intervene in collective memory, transcending the bias of traditional monuments, their propaganda, and instrumentalization. Drawing on the layered meanings of tata in Wolof—referring to a fortified enclosure, earthen wall, burial ground, or sacred space—Thiam rethinks the monument not as a structure alone, but as a bounded site where protection, community, and memory converge.

Commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), co-produced by Dior Thiam and HKW, 2026

Work in the exhibition: Tata (2026), acrylic, charcoal, glue, and wax-print on canvas, cotton thread, wood, clay, 360 × 140 × 140 cm. Courtesy of the artist