Omar Victor Diop

The Völklingen Ironworks flooded in red light
Copyright: Weltkulturerbe Völklinger Hütte | Oliver Dietze

Omar Victor Diop

Omar Victor Diop
Copyright: Omar Victor Diop

*1980 Dakar, Senegal

Works

Diaspora | Liberty | Allegoria

Material
Print

Date
2015 | 2017 | 2021

Description

Omar Victor Diop’s works selected for THE TRUE SIZE OF AFRICA come from three series that counter the Western view of the world with an African perspective.

The Diaspora series references historical portraits of Black individuals who achieved social prominence in their diasporic lives but were largely ignored by traditional histories due to racism. Diop revisits these exceptional life stories, incorporating soccer accessories into the portraits to draw parallels with modern African athletes striving to succeed in Europe.

Liberty recounts key figures and moments from the global Black struggle for freedom, such as the eighteenth-century Jamaican icon Queen Nanny or the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, which sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

In Allegoria, Diop turns his gaze to the future, focusing on the climate crisis and its consequences for the African continent and the entire planet.

                                        

Studio of Vanities

Date
2012 - 2015

Omar Victor Diop lives in Dakar, Senegal. He works primarily in art and fashion photography. Some of his works also combine photography with other art forms such as costume design, styling and creative writing in order to form a “Gesamtkunstwerk”. Photography is his chosen medium for capturing the diversity of modern African society and its various lifestyles. In the series “Studio of vanities”, Omar Diop portrays friends and colleagues from Dakar in a revival of the tradition of studio photography that once flourished in western Africa. The selected works were shown as part of the exhibition AFRIKA - IM BLICK DER FOTOGRAFEN .


Omar Victor Diop / Courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris