Anna Binta Diallo: Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light

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Courtesy of the Artist and Towards Gallery.

Anna Binta Diallo, Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light, 2023. Digital collage.

Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light is an exhibition featuring works by Anna Binta Diallo about the ancient and contemporary tools we use to map and navigate land, water, and sky, on view at Mitchell Art Gallery from May 27 - August 8, 2025.

Layering ideas of geologic time with histories of mapping, Anna Binta Diallo’s recent bodies of work engage her digital collage practice in poetic reflections on the ways we navigate land, water, and sky. Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light is a meditation on the multitude of strategies we have used over millennia to map and chart paths across the earth, inspired by a collection of discarded paper maps. Diallo’s works on suspended plexiglass and Japanese paper invite us to consider the relationships between colonial histories and the map fragments. Layering their segments amongst fossils and cloud formations, the artist refuses the map’s totalizing and flattening view. This strategy is a reminder of the humbling timescale of the planet and its shifting tectonic plates when compared to human and personal histories of traversing the land.