Presented by Samanta Antoine in collaboration with Mspace, Dòmi Leve brings together a new body of work developed during the artist's studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Born in Port-au-Prince (Haïti) and raised in France, Antoine's practice is deeply informed by her cultural heritage and diasporic experience. Working across painting, text, and performance, she explores the intersections of personal and collective, memory and imagination, the visible and the invisible.
The exhibition takes its title, Dòmi Leve ("sleeping awake"), from a state suspended between waking and dreaming. It draws from the concept of Nan Dòmi, described in Haitian Vodou as a state of heightened perception attained through initiation and sustained attention. Neither fully asleep nor fully awake, it is a condition in which the boundaries between the known and unknown worlds become permeable, allowing one to perceive what ordinarily remains unseen. Rather than an escape from reality, Nan Dòmi offers another way of inhabiting it.
Antoine's figures reflect this state. Emerging and receding, blurred, fragmented, or partially obscured, they appear suspended between visibility and disappearance. Their presence suggests forms of knowledge that exceed the material world and resist fixed definition. Women appear throughout Antoine's work as recurring figures. For the artist, they are not merely subjects but guardians, witnesses, and mediators between different worlds. They carry familial and ancestral memories across generations, sustaining connections between people and place, history and the present.
Artist's info
Samanta Antoine (b. Port-au-Prince, Haïti) lives and works in Paris. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she works across painting, text, and performance. Her practice explores the intersections of personal and collective, memory and imagination, the visible and the invisible, drawing on her cultural heritage and diasporic experience.
Curator
Emma Wang
Emma Wang is a London-based curator and writer whose research centres on mother–daughter relationships, intergenerational care, and diasporic experiences. A graduate of the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, and recipient of an Arts Council England Project Grant (2025), she has collaborated with organisations and collectives including Sine Screen, MayDay Rooms, the Feminist Duration Reading Group, and Roarrr Theatre.