Speculative Silhouettes and Expanded Histories: The layered practice of Anna Binta Diallo

The silhouettes of two women huddle together, solid forms composed of texture, shadow and light. One seems to be whispering in the ear of the other, her hand up as if to guard a secret. Within the outlines of their faces and arms, a striped texture fills the space—flower petals? Feathers? It’s hard to be sure. Their long dresses are dotted with faded moons, tagged with letters suggesting a mysterious taxonomy of waxing and waning. I strain to find some grounding in the image before accepting that its referents are immune to my gaze, immanent and immaterial in this novel display. 

This is the work of Anna Binta Diallo, where images are gently prised away from their contexts and must reconcile themselves to new intimacies and tensions. Human, animal, geologic, and cosmic forms nestle and overlap, juxtaposing and entangling one another. The archives they emerge from, meanwhile, are obscured, defanged, or reanimated by these surprising new proximities. 

Looking at Diallo’s large-scale collages, we can’t help but suspend our expectations. Where a person’s features might be, the spiralled shell of a fossil fills the space. Shards of a map, partial colonial names still visible, float amicably behind images of ancient veined rocks and the etched lines of mountain ranges and rivers. Any attempt to impose order on the fragmented layers is, of course, warmly refused. Instead, we’re left to steep in an affective space of desire and intuition, building new structures of feeling from these visual vestiges.

Diallo is an interdisciplinary artist working across various media to examine memory, identity, visual cultures, and historical narrative. Cutting up and remixing with collage a wide array of archival media, she probes the relationships between personal and collective histories, and between humans and the natural world. The silhouette is a key motif in Diallo’s work, serving as a container for these layered assemblages. Nested circles with ragged edges, reminiscent of Earth’s strata, also feature heavily. Creating both printed and sculptural pieces, Diallo often arranges her colourful exhibits like expanded collages to invite slow, non-linear engagement. 

Born in Dakar, Senegal and raised in St. Boniface, Manitoba, Diallo spent her early career in Montreal, studying and working. She returned to Winnipeg in 2021 to teach at the University of Manitoba School of Art, where her practice has continued to grow. In recent years, Diallo has been prolific, developing multiple bodies of work that stem from a core set of questions but unfurl along different planes. In 2025 alone, she had five solo and five group exhibitions or works across the country: a testament, perhaps, to her restless curiosity and our craving for work that refracts current conversations through a wide-angle lens.   

Questions of identity and relationship to place and culture are the underlying engine of Diallo’s work. Rather than focusing exclusively on the transcultural and diasporic histories that shape her own experience, however, she uses personal exploration as an entry point to broadly examine how individual and cultural narratives form. How are our identities assembled, and what role do visual, historical, and ideological structures play in who we become? Diallo consistently raises questions that rebuff easy answers. In this way, she gently loosens our grip on any notion of a static, inevitable self.

In Wanderings, a body of work from 2021, Diallo explores an early chapter in this continuous personal investigation. Pulling images from a rich archive of print media, including children’s books, illustrated folk anthologies, scientific works, and encyclopaedias, she creates silhouetted figures drawn from the folk traditions of her Senegalese and Franco-Manitoban heritage, with Métis ancestry on her maternal grandfather’s side. These reconstituted archetypes, bearing fragments of people, animals, landscapes, star systems, and maps, hold the hushed magic of the foundational myths we use to make sense of the world. Several are beguiling scenes of humans and animals shown in ambiguous dynamics of respect, reciprocity or domination. Though specific cultural histories are referenced in the work, she points us instead to surprising affinities between characters and ideas across cultural mythologies, without lapsing into flattening relativism. Here, Diallo shares and indulges our deep human craving for wayfinding stories. At the same time, she subverts the power of certain archival images to reify processes of classification and othering, upending what Maandeeq Mohamed has called the “violence of fact.”¹ Rather than negating these loaded visual artifacts, she renders them mutable elements in service to the striking beauty of her new configurations.

Voyageurs/Almanac (2021-23), Diallo’s follow-up project, delves deeper into the relationships between humans and the natural world. Here, she considers the ways people and cultures have attempted to make sense of their environment, often as a means to control it. Still referencing folkloric tropes, her large, printed collages use geographic, scientific, landscape and meteorological imagery to create silhouetted figures that are somehow both speculative and historical. Not only does the work implicitly challenge dominant colonial narratives of natural exploitation, it also gestures to the many other ways of being that have always existed. Her decision to install the work differently in each space, according to what she finds there, attests to this almost liberating sense of contingency.

Both these bodies of work reveal a compelling blend of critique and openness in dealing with visual remnants of the past. Diallo’s work often deconstructs colonial or anthropocentric archives, questioning the epistemologies that uphold them and taking up a lineage of critical Black and Indigenous counter-archival practices. But there’s an abiding sense of curiosity rather than censure. Making these images (and countless others) into an experimental medium, she offers no didactic closure. Instead, she examines the very processes by which meaning is made, circulated, and undone. This then becomes a political move at the level of practice. Sidestepping the colonial demand to represent or transmit knowledge, Diallo asserts what Métis artist and writer David Garneau might call the “dialogic mode” and implicates us all in figuring out where to go from here.²

This disarming talent for making historical media into flexible fodder owes much to Diallo’s process. Though she clearly has a strong affinity for the archive, Diallo refuses the authority of a typical researcher. The media she works with often come to her organically, prompted by discoveries in previous bodies of work or given as gifts by those familiar with her predilection for the past. Instead of subjecting the troves of images she works with to rigorous analysis in an attempt to unearth some kind of latent truth, she uses them to playfully call the very notion of a singular historical narrative into question. Each visual fragment, cut off from its unknown whole, is brought into a fray of floating signifiers. The result feels remarkably generative. Desire and longing infuse the work’s final form, giving shape to the unruly, affective processes behind personal and collective mythologies. Her layered characters, meanwhile, hint at what the fiction of the archive cannot contain: the abundance of historical lives, and worlds yet to come.

In more recent work, Diallo’s preoccupations seem to have continued to ripple outward in wider concentric circles, as she broadens her scope of visual material and temporal and spatial scales. Topographies (2023) brings layers of ancient rock and terrestrial forms to bear on delicate paper colonial maps, making these constructed political documents almost quaint when juxtaposed with the unfathomable timescale of a tectonic Earth. Its follow-up, Topographies/Perforations (2024), tends to the failures and fragility of cartography as a means to describe and divide the world, using perforated paper to cast shadows that convey both absence and possibility. In Oscura (2025), the vast cycles of celestial bodies overlay the comparatively minute rhythms of human and animal life, suggesting both known and mysterious ways in which these distant bodies influence our existence. 

In tandem with this growing thematic scope, Diallo’s approach to media and installation has continued to expand. Increasingly, she creates hanging, standing, or even deconstructed collages, some inviting engagement from all angles. This experimentation with sculptural space renders Diallo’s questions of how to engage the past even more dimensional, as she boldly reconstructs histories before our eyes. In this way, she confronts us anew with the arbitrary and impermanent nature of historical references that so often lay claim to objectivity. Again, Diallo reveals something like a twinned skepticism and faith in the relationship between imagery and narrative. Our visual histories are always freighted, she suggests. They fail to attend to embodied, lived experiences. And yet, they remain an indispensable tool for imagining something different. 

The notion of dialogue comes up often in blurbs about Diallo’s work, and it’s interesting to consider exactly what kind of discussion she draws us into. Just as she densely layers her pieces to pleasantly disorienting effect, so too does she leave us with a palimpsest of interpretations to sift through and conversations to have. 

On one level, Diallo’s work continually brings us back to salient questions of identity formation, imbued with memory, longing and possibility. She deftly conjures the plenitude of cultural worlds that produce us, while attending to the ways that forces like colonialism, imperialism and extraction shape our histories, and, correspondingly, ourselves. Her use of the silhouette suggests a dialectical notion of personal and cultural formation. As Diallo puts it, “by collaging silhouettes with found imagery, I create new types of portraits that speak to cultural narratives and community identities, making them universal yet deeply personal.”³ This tension between “identity and anonymity,” individual and community, allows for a liberating fluidity around questions of the self. It also makes space for the desires and refusals that inflect subjectivity. At the same time, this work invokes a sense of collective responsibility to attend to both buried histories and more radical futures. 

On another level, Diallo’s work hints at something mystical or chimeric. In layering human figures with vast systems that escape our subjective limitations, she also looks beyond political and historical narratives to mine the deeper mysteries of being alive. A form of unguarded wonder often permeates her pieces. She attunes us to affective entanglements that unsettle abstract knowledge. She asks about our place in an animate cosmos teeming with bodies and life. There’s something refreshing about this commitment to enormous, ancient questions at a time when art can face pressure to narrow its attention toward contemporary stakes. Perhaps it’s even a refusal of the current terms of engagement. As in her pieces, these interpretations neither negate nor surrender to each other. Instead, they mutually expose and overlap, shifting assemblages of possible readings.   

If there is some kind of centripetal force holding the layers of this expansive oeuvre together, it’s in part Diallo’s integrity as she pulls at the same central threads. There’s a strong sense that she is guided foremost by her own curiosity and a need to contend with deeply personal questions. She’s also unapologetically invested in beauty. Each piece overcomes our critical defences with a joyful sensibility to colour and shape that’s generous but never cloying. By pursuing this long exploration from the implicated position of a complex, evolving, desiring self, Diallo paradoxically permits us all to do the same. Much like the interplay of individual and collective embedded in her work, we too move fluidly between the personal and political, resonance and difference, human and non-human worlds as we interact with her pieces. Acting as additional, ambivalent layers to each installation, we fluctuate between constructed selves and silhouettes. 

This digital version has been modified from the print edition.

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Gabrielle Willms is a writer currently based in Tiohtià:ke / Montréal. 

Anna Binta Diallo is a multidisciplinary visual artist who explores themes of memory and nostalgia to create unexpected works about identity. She is currently an assistant professor at the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, on Treaty 1. She is represented in Canada by Towards Gallery.

1. 
   Maandeeq Mohamed, “Somehow I Found You: On Black Archival Practices,” C Magazine, no. 137 (Spring 2018), https://cmagazine.com/articles/somehow-i-found-you-on-black-archival-practices.
2. 
   David Garneau, “Writing About Indigenous Art with Critical Care,” C Magazine, no. 145 (Spring 2020), https://cmagazine.com/issues/145/writing-about-indigenous-art-with-critical-care.
3. 
   Anna Binta Diallo, “Facing Photographs,” Anna Binta Diallo, 2025.

This article is published in issue 42.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue