Bintou Dembélé
A prominent artist on the French hip-hop scene, Bintou Dembélé has collaborated with artists such as Denis Darzacq, Mohamed Bourouissa, and Sophiatou Kossoko. Shaped by a wide range of influences, her work incorporates repetitive music with rhythmic polyphonies and Street Dance. Dembélé explores marginalized cultures as well as ritual and corporeal memories, questions notions of gender, probes the wounds of the past and the possibility to move beyond them through strategies of reappropriation and “marronnage.” Her performances draw on various aesthetics from the worlds of dance, music, voice, and the visual arts.
Dembélé is the founder of Rualité, a structure through which she produced L’Assise (2004), LOL (2008), Mon appart’ en dit long (2010), Z.H. (2014),
S/T/R/A/T/E/S-Quartet (2016) and Le Syndrome de l’initié.e (2018). Clément Cogitore called on her to choreograph Les Indes galantes at the Paris National Opera: a short film gone viral on the digital platform, 3e Scène (2017) was followed by the full choreography of Rameau’s opéra-ballet at the Opéra Bastille (2019). As part of its exhibition Opéra as a world. The quest for a total work of art (2020)the Centre Pompidou-Metz gave her carte-blanche, which led to the creation of Les Indes Galantes #3.
In 2020, the Lyon National Opera invited Dembélé to put together a solo performance for dancer Merel van Heeswijk. An associate artist at Ateliers Médicis (Clichy-sous- Bois / Montfermeil), she has also been an artist-in- residence at Villa Médicis (Rome) and Villa Albertine (Chicago). An associate artist at Ateliers Médicis (Clichy-sous-Bois / Montfermeil), she has also been an artist-in- residence at Villa Médicis (Rome) and Villa Albertine (Chicago). She is one of ten international artists invited to take part in the 10-year anniversary celebration of the Centre Pompidou-Metz. On this occasion, she directed the dance film -s/t/r/a/t/e/s-.
