PAST EXHIBITIONS

A Monographic Exhibition
by Joël Andrianomearisoa
12 April – 18 May 2025

Curated by
Rina Ralay-Ranaivo

Hakanto Contemporary
Alhambra Gallery · Ankadimbahoaka
Antananarivo · Madagascar

Please Sing Me My Song Before You Go
is Joël Andrianomearisoa’s first exhibition at Hakanto Contemporary.
It unfolds around a cinematic work of the same title — the artist’s first film — commissioned by IFA Gallery and premiered in Berlin in 2024 as part of the exhibition Measures, Lullabies and Whispers.

Working across multiple forms of expression and manipulating a wide range of media, Joël Andrianomearisoa weaves his practice through an array of materials: metal, textile, paper, words — and now image and sound. His film Please Sing Me My Song Before You Go is an intimate and melancholic work, drawing on the resonances of a fragmented memory, haunted by the echo of a lullaby, Iny Hono Izy Ravorombazaha. Passed down through generations, this melody is itself inspired by the traditional tale Imaitsoanala: a story of rupture and flight, in which the giant bird Ravorombe opposes the union of his human daughter with her beloved, triggering an odyssey of escape and an ode to the longing for freedom.

Here, however, the lullaby is not merely a song of comfort. It becomes a song of surrender. Joël Andrianomearisoa subverts the gentleness of the refrain to reveal its underlying tear: that of departure, renunciation, and the gradual erasure of the other. Through an abstract mise-en-scène, he captures the remnants of presence — the memory of a first encounter, the slow encroachment of silence, leading ultimately to the abdication of bodies.

The obsessive rhythm of the lullaby becomes a living matter within the film, a pulse oscillating between mourning and hope. In this movement between the personal and the universal, the film does more than tell a story: it becomes a space, a threshold where surrender turns into a whisper, where absence is inscribed in image, and where the song endures, suspended in time.

From this sense of abandonment, Joël Andrianomearisoa also unfolds other aesthetic forms and languages throughout the exhibition, through a series of additional installations, including works that explore accumulation and repetition as attempts to fix memory and question forgetting.
First, a series of display cases housing flickering candles, slowly consuming their own light. The wax melts, solidifies and accumulates within the glass, leaving behind silent imprints of time slipping away. A fragile presence, a memory in the making.
This scene inevitably evokes a familiar landscape: the streets of Antananarivo at nightfall. Ephemeral makeshift stalls where the discreet glow of candles illuminates the precarious stands of street vendors — a fleeting light accompanying passers-by returning home or night wanderers surrendering to the darkness.

Inspired by minimalist art** — a movement associated with major figures such as Donald Judd (1928–1994), renowned for his geometric sculptures in metal and Plexiglas — this installation reinterprets an everyday ritual, elevating it to the realm of poetry.
This is followed by an installation of four hundred aluminium plates, rising like a constellation of memories. Evoking commemorative plaques, they inscribe into metal the echo of a presence, the weight of a memory frozen in matter. Echoing earlier works currently on view at the Fondation Zinsou in Benin — La Promesse de la Terre, an accumulation of earthen plates, and Le Miroir de la Terre, an accumulation of mica plates — Joël Andrianomearisoa renders tangible, through materiality, the testimony of time following separation, ensuring that the imprint of the past endures and that memory does not slip into oblivion.

In this same pursuit of preserving traces, the artist extends the gesture by scattering the imprints of his own hand throughout the exhibition space. On canvases impregnated with black oil, he leaves a mark that is both intimate and universal — a silent dialogue between presence and erasure, between body and memory, between what remains and what eludes us.

Finally, with this exhibition by Joël Andrianomearisoa, Hakanto Contemporary will permanently close its first exhibition site at Alhambra Gallery, Ankadimbahoaka, after five years of activity and programming, in order to fully invest its new space within the Filatex Industrial Zone. The artist thus marks this final chapter with a highly symbolic gesture — a last resonance, an imprint before silence — extending the story of this foundational and historic site, witness to so many creations and dialogues.

Rina Ralay-Ranaivo
March 2025

An exhibition
co-produced with Kantoko
in partnership with Filatex Properties
with the support of the Fonds Yavarhoussen