Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light

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Photo courtesy of Mitchell Art Gallery

An installation view of Anna Binta Diallo: Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light (photo by Blaine Campbell)

A big thank you to all who attended our Coffee with the Curator event to celebrate the opening of Anna Binta Diallo: Those mountains of shadows and valleys of light. You can now visit the MAG to view the exhibition from Tuesday to Friday, 12 - 5 p.m. through 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.