TITLE: SABAR

his project of self-portraits pays homage to a Senegalese dance reserved for women, the SABAR. Men who dare to dance it are called all sorts of derogatory names. I did it when I was 6 years old. The memory of my mother’s angry face coming to look for me in the crowd of women haunted me throughout my childhood and adolescence. The experience was also a factor in my choice to go into exile and move to France at the age of 18, under the pretext of studying. 26 years later, I decided to dance the SABAR again, hiding behind a negative that operates as a protective veil.
It was a way to assert my homosexuality and to shade light on the issue of lgbt-phobia in Senegal.

AUTHOR: GABRIEL DIA (France)

Gabriel DIA was born in 1985 in SENEGAL. Exiled because of his sexuality, he arrived in France in 2003, where he still lives and works.
Engineer by training, Gabriel developed an artistic language through writing and photography.His passion for writing resulted in his first novel,
"The Birth of a Virgin" being published by Éditions de Montigny in 2013.

Among Dia’s visual inspirations are the works of such photographers as Dominique Issermann and Peter Lindbergh, to name but a few. But it was the discovery of Sebastiao Slagado's works at the 2016 exhibition at the Polka Gallery that drove him to devote himself to the art of photography. In his own words, through this art he "can express much more at the same time”.
In 2018, after training at EFEET, he held his first Paris exhibition entitled "Nature". A universal work, he describes as inspired by his life, which echoes the eternal questions that everyone asks:

Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going ?