Stanley Wany
Stanley Wany is a multidisciplinary artist whose work consists of revisiting colonial and historical archives with the aim of extracting the history of his Afro-descendant ancestors. He begins his exploration as an editor and creator of experimental graphic novels that explore the nonlinearity of narration and the unconscious. After a residency in Finland, he made the leap into visual art, continuing his research, this time incorporating the historicity of narratives present in popular culture.
Through drawing, painting, installation and experimental graphic novels, he deepens his reflections on popular culture, myths and the subconscious in relation to the experience of people of Afro-descendants in Western society. By experimenting with connoted mediums such as coffee, molasses, indigo and cotton, he embodies the concept of “creolization” developed by Édouard Glissant. In 2024-2025, in partnership with the CIÉCO research and reflection group, he participated in a research residency on decolonial museology at the Redpath Museum. He recently completed a master's degree at UQAM as well as a research-creation residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in Brooklyn.
Artist statement:
My practice includes the study of strategies of survival and cultural transmission within Afro-descendant diasporas. By drawing on archives and my family legacy, I seek to rebuild the traditional and historical links that have forged my identity despite dominant systems.
The approaches to this reconstruction consist of updating the elements which ensured that my family was able not only to survive, but also to prosper in the colonial system. In an anthropological approach, I aim to trace my genealogy in the institutional archive and oral histories. This is embedded in my desire to re-establish my Creole and African heritage, having been the subject of attempts to erase it by the slavery system under which my ancestors were transposed into this space that the Antilles have become.
Through drawing, I approach the act of tracing as that of commemorating my ancestors, their cultures and their beliefs. Through strong symbolic representations, drawing on a specifically West Indian iconography, I produce works that deal with the spiritual and psychological foundations that fueled the resilience of my African predecessors, despite the trials of colonization.
Pragmatically, the exploration of my family heritage and its connection with colonialism is also reflected in the choice of materials used for creation, themselves coming from the plantation regime, such as coffee, sugar, cotton and indigo. Also, by confronting drawing with other elements – such as found objects, sculptures and raw materials – my practice tends towards the hybridization of different referents. Linked to the concept of creolization, based on West Indian literature popularized by Édouard Glissant, it is based on the encounters of various cultures that constituted my family history. Showcasing the intertwining of several perspectives, these installation works act as new or unpredictable places, what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt calls “the space of appearance”.
