Mame-Diarra Niang’s Remember to Forget, published by MACK in 2024, is conceived as a tetralogy bringing together four bodies of work: Call Me When You Get There, Léthé, Sama Guent Guii, and Æther. Across 216 pages, the book treats photography less as a means of identifying a subject than as a way to unsettle the terms by which a subject becomes visible.

At the centre of Niang’s approach is an understanding of territory as plastic: mutable, shifting, and continually remade. The Black body is not presented as a fixed image or stable category. Instead, the photographs work through forms of non-portraiture in which the self dissolves, recedes, fragments, blurs, or appears only indirectly. This refusal to make Blackness legible on conventional terms gives the book its particular conceptual force, while preserving an atmosphere of uncertainty rather than resolving it into explanation.

The four series are carefully gathered into a single artist’s book, allowing their differing modes of abstraction to speak across one another. Memory and forgetting become not simply themes but organizing principles: identity appears as a territory composed of selected recollections and erasures, vulnerable to disappearance and open to renewal. The book’s significance lies in this sustained resistance to the demand for a definitive image of the self.

For collectors, Remember to Forget merits attention as a substantial, English-language hardcover publication that records Niang’s work in an intentionally composite form. Its value is not dependent on documentary completeness, but on the precision with which image, sequence, and conceptual inquiry are brought into relation. It is a book to read slowly, as an evolving structure in which opacity is not a deficiency, but an artistic position.