Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye

Souconna

Swans under Spiraea Japonica, 2025 (detail)

Grace presents Souconna, an exhibition by Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye.

Souconna is a plural protagonist — at once the Saône River, a fictitious painting conservator, and a painter dwelling in the French city of Lyon. In this scene from an expansive, evolving work of speculative fiction, Souconna’s shifting persona allows a freedom to test ideas of belonging in the fictional, in multiplicity and in Lyon.

Yana Nafysa Dombrowsky-M’Baye is a multidisciplinary researcher and educator from Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. Yana’s matrilineal ancestry returns to Sénégal and France, and her patrilineal lineage is of Polish/Czech descent. Across moving image, site-specific installation, and the fabrication of spirited objects, Yana’s practice is a poetic inquiry into the material and immaterial conditions of belonging.

Dombrowsky-M’Baye's exhibitions include exsudat at the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon for the European Night of the Museums (2025), Permissions at Artspace Aotearoa (2024), setueu at RM Gallery (2023), and wiggling together, falling apart at Michael Lett Gallery (2022).

Souconna, 2025 (installation)

August, 1838, 2025 (00:00)

August, 1838, 2025 (installation) Digital video 15:57

Souconna, 2025 (installation)

Swans under Spiraea Japonica, 2025 Gum Bichromate print (double exposure), 1mm steel frame (patinated) 280 x 220

Nuphar Lutea of Saône, East of Fourvière, 2025 Gum Bichromate print, 1mm steel frame (patinated) 280 x 220

Saône over Hydrangea Quercifolia, 2025 Gum Bichromate print (double exposure), 1mm steel frame (patinated) 280 x 220

Nuphar Lutea of Saône, East of Fourvière & Saône over Hydrangea Quercifolia, 2025 (installation)

Silvered waterlily (nuphar lutea), 2025 Sand-cast aluminium, inscribed steel bar Dimensions variable

Since antiquity, precise incisions have been made in the Acacia trees of sub-saharan Africa, to let out a viscuous substance which is left to harden over the dry season into ambered bulbs. Recolted and ground to a powder, the material is traditionally used to treat respiratory afflictions and wounds, and burnt in ritual for its protective and purificatory properties. When introduced to Western Europe, the powder enabled finer control over the viscosity of inks, aquarelles, photographic emulsions, and industrial dyes.

Before the expansion of France’s rail networks, gum arabic was imported along fluvial routes, transported from colonial ports like Saint-Louis of Sénégal, where Sénégalese and mixed-race merchant families held trading monopolies on goods collected along the Sénégal river. Maritime and riverine networks dominated the trade, circulating pigments, plants, and primary materials into the interior of France through estuaries, canals, and rivers such as the Rhône and Saône.

Swans under Spiraea Japonica & Robinia Pseudoacacia amphora, 2025 (installation)

Robinia Pseudoacacia amphora, 2025 Wood-turned Robinia Pseudoacadia from Rhône Valley, welded steel bar mount with inscription. Dimensions variable

Souconna is accompanied by a text by Felixe Laing:

“…By the doorway a silver waterlily appears suspended, perhaps conjured by the mythic Souconna river figure herself. The dream-like or insomniac staging of the conservator’s interior room offers fictional but tangible talismans to often obscured or undocumented colonial histories.”

Full text available here.

Please contact the gallery here to receive a catalogue for Souconna.