Catalogue > At random

In the 21st century, you returned to the archipelagos Saint Louis of Sénégal, and Saint Louis of Paris to unearth vestiges of signares—women once at the centre of Occidental French West African commerce and society. Through the night, through the whispers of your aunts and nieces, through the institutions that house present-day French “patrimoine (cultural heritage),” you fell into a spiral between colonial presents and the past.

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye is a pluridisciplinary researcher and educator from T?maki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Her matrilineal ancestry traces to Senegal and France, while her patrilineal lineage is of Polish and Czech descent. Through iterative and ritualistic processes, Yana’s practice is a poetic inquiry into the material and immaterial conditions of belonging, approaching artistic practice as archaeological gesture, unearthing the spectral, often erased presence of intercultural identities embedded in sites marked by colonial history and personal heritage. At present, Yana is at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, participating as one of ten internationally selected artists in the In Situ program, which will conclude March 2026.