Samanta Antoine

Samanta Antoine was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and grew up in France. Trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she explores her cultural heritage and diasporic experience through painting, text, drawing and performance. Her work focuses on the intersections between the intimate and the collective, memory and imagination, the visible and the invisible.

Her figures appear and disappear, blurred, fragmented or partially hidden, suggesting forms of knowledge beyond the material world. Women, recurring figures in her work, act as guardians, witnesses and mediators between different worlds, carrying family and ancestral memories.

Interested in the religious ceremonies of Haiti, from vodou practices to Christian rites, she examines how beliefs, rituals and cosmologies have been transformed by the histories of slavery, colonialism and migration. Vodou is approached here not only as a spiritual practice but also as a space of creation and resistance, sustaining links between generations, the living and the dead.

Her exhibition « Dòmi Leve » (« Sleeping Awake »), presented with Mspace and curated by Emma Wang, takes its title from the Haitian vodou notion of Nan Dòmi: a state of heightened perception, suspended between waking and dreaming, in which the boundaries between the known and unknown worlds become permeable. In this state, painting becomes a space where scattered fragments can come into relation, offering glimpses of what usually remains beyond the reach of sight.