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Malala Andrialavidrazana is a visual artist and photographer born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1971. Living in since the age of 12, Malala is a graduate of the École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Paris La Villette. Her dual training as an architect and spatial anthropologist has shaped her way of perceiving the world, constructing and deconstructing stories, and understanding official narratives, which she mischievously unravels and re-embroiders in digital patchworks. An artist and free woman, Malala Andrialavidrazana plays with images and the photographic medium to remind us that photography can be a tool of power and manipulation.
At the end of 2024, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris entrusted the space of the "great glass roof" to the artist who created for the occasion a STUNNING and monumental work, on a curved wall nearly 60 meters long. A proposal multiplied on the scale of the architecture of the Palais, which was the opportunity for the artist to give life to a unique set of digital photomontage work that she has exhibited around the world since 2015 under the name Figures .
For this series Figures , Malala has combed through a prodigious collection of archival documents. These documents, mostly inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries, are in turn maps and planispheres, postage stamps, banknotes, engravings, advertising posters, and sometimes album covers. Each of the works bears as its title the year of publication of the map that constitutes the starting point of her research, or rather, of her excavations.
When we delve into the details of her digital paintings built in successive layers, we encounter images that refer to the birth of the modern era: political, economic, social stories, the expansion of industrial capitalism, the birth of globalization in its relationship to colonization, the accelerated circulation of goods and images and the extraction of natural resources. A story of male domination and north-south power relations, but also symbols of regained sovereignty or that of the place of women in the social balance. Over time, the artist invents a language whose approach is resolutely turned towards history, with wit, her collages of images create new forms of circulation and bear witness to contemporary issues.
As art historian Dominique Malaquais wrote: “In this world convulsed by the violence of power relations, the art of Malala Andrialavidrazana calls us to rethink our own relationship to the world.”
Malala Andrialavidrazana is a recipient of the HSBC Photography Award. Her work has been featured at the Art et Industrie Triennial, Condition Publique (Roubaix), and in the exhibitions “The World in Common” at the Tate Modern (London), “Photography: Real and Imagined,” National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), “Indigo Waves and Other Stories,” Gropius Bau & Savvy (Berlin), and the Sharjah Biennale (United Arab Emirates). She has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including the Rencontres de Bamako, Doual'art, Zeit Mocaa (Cape Town), the Lagos Photo Festival, the Karachi and Chanjiang Biennales, the Dhaka Art Summit, and Para Site (Hong Kong). at the Lyon Biennale, the Pac Milan, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Clément Foundation (Martinique), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boghossian Foundation (Brussels) and the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Malala Andrialavidrazana's works are notably featured in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris).
In 2025, Malala Andrialavidrazana's works were presented in the WOMEN exhibition at Galerie Perrotin (Paris), curated by Pharell Williams; on the Art Absolument Gallery stand during the Art Paris fair at the Grand Palais; in the program entrusted to Kiddy Smile by the Nouveau Printemps – contemporary creation festival in Toulouse; and as part of a dedicated Art Dinner, for a pop-up exhibition at the Chalet des îles. This Art Dinner sealed the launch of the Collectors Circle of ArtMajeur by YourArt.
Sonia Perrin
