Through hybrid, glitch-inspired video art, Denis Maksaens confronts colonial gazes, structural violence, and the sacrificed body, centering queer, racialized, and marginalized subjectivities. His works urge viewers to rethink power, identity and shared fragility in today’s fractured world.
Maksaens Denis, "Does resisting make us men ?...," 3 channels video installation on a metal and iron structure representing the voodoo spirit Ogou Badagri Dim. : 2M90 H x 3M L. Courtesy of the artist.
The modern tourist economy has played a major role in creating an exotic imaginary of the Caribbean, full of clichés and stereotypes. Even today, this imaginary world continues to reinforce the idea of a sensual Caribbean, made up of beautiful beaches and magnificent sunsets. It’s the dream place of all possible pleasures. All you need is money to enjoy it. Exoticism is a symbolic form of dominance, which reduces the other person to a simple element of the decor.
It’s against this stereotypical vision that Maksaens Denis takes a stand in Tragédie tropicale (2014), a video installation combining projections, barbed wire and a soundtrack composed by artist LeRobot. At the heart of the work is the question of looking: who is looking? how do we look, and from where? Maksaens depicts naked, hyper-masculine male bodies. The work illustrates the stereotypes and clichés that confine the Caribbean to a simplistic, reductive perspective, while questioning the systems of representation of the Caribbean in the Western-centric imagination. Playing with the contrast between “tropical paradise” and “tropical tragedy”, Maksaens proposes a political reading of these places, revealing that they are criss-crossed by histories, conflicts and a memory that is often invisibilized.
Maksaens Denis, "Tropical Tragedy," installation video, screen, barbed wire, soundtrack by LeRobot, 2014. Private collection.
At the heart of the work is the question of looking: who is looking? how do we look, and from where?
Maksaens Denis is a video artist who lives between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His work is a constant quest for experimentation, assembling various techniques and mediums such as performance, installation, sculpture and collage. The result is a hybrid, fragmented body of work that mesmerizes and hypnotizes, and is closely related to glitch art, a New Media art form centered on the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes.
He has developed a singular visual language in which he uses new digital technologies and video art to express his socio-political concerns, such as the loss of people’s fundamental rights and freedoms, and the rise of conservative powers around the world. For him, video doesn’t document, rather, it envelops and disrupts legibility.
Maksaens Denis, Performance Glass Head, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
The result is a hybrid, fragmented body of work that mesmerizes and hypnotizes, and is closely related to glitch art, a New Media art form centered on the practice of using digital or analog errors for aesthetic purposes.
The question of the sacrificed body recurs frequently in Maksaens’ work. In Saint Sebastian, 2014, a performer is naked, surrounded by barbed wire and pierced by arrows, in reference to the figure of the martyr Saint Sebastian in a tetraptych. Maksaens’ poetic-artistic gesture is a tragic one, insofar as his installations expose the irreconcilable tensions between individuals’ desire for freedom and well-being, and the world’s oppressive forces. Subjected to a situation of permanent tension, often the artist’s body becomes the container of the structural violence that surrounded him. This black, half-dressed body, riddled with arrows, whose upward gaze seems lost and haggard, can be read as the violence suffered by individuals based on their origin, sexual orientation or allegiance.
As Maksaens told me in a conversation in Haiti, this figure brings together his various social and sexual concerns. For him the figure of the martyr is a reference to the struggles of individuals whose expressions of identity are increasingly threatened by the global rise of conservativism. The martyr becomes this political body, a body that resists and a body that often ends up being sacrificed and crushed, either by censorship, authoritarianism or populism.
Denis Maksaens, "Saint Sebastien," photograph on canvas 58 9/10 × 39 4/5 in | 149.5 × 101 cm, 2016. Courtesy of Collection of Le Centre d’Art.
His video installation Does Resisting Make Us Men? (2018) shown for the first time at Mammon, a group exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Split, Croatia, consists of three synchronized films shown on three screens mounted on a wood-and-iron structure, that deals with the vèvè, a religious symbol commonly used in different branches of Vodun, representing the Ogou Badagri voodoo warrior loa. Taken in various locations such as Voodoo ceremonies, market scenes and daily life, the videos are punctuated by the performance of a nude dancer. Here, Maksaens questions how our society values strength to the detriment of vulnerability and fragility, and how this hierarchy of affects excludes women, minorities and queer bodies.
Maksaens’ work is sensitive to social injustice, racism and homophobia. It challenges our gaze and our position as spectators. It tries to offer us new perspectives to be more attentive to the stories of minorities to better (re)inhabit the world. He invites us to think differently about our relationship with the world, to re-inhabit it, not through domination or survival, but through the recognition of shared fragilities and the solidarity we need to build.
Maksaens Denis (b. 1968 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a multimedia artist known for his experimental video installations that intertwine performance, photography, and sound.
Ervenshy Hugo Jean-Louis art criticism focuses on curatorial narratives and Caribbean artistic strategies. He is Assistant Director at the Centre d’Art and collaborates with the Museum Association of the Caribbean. He co-develops NOU-LA, an independent research space for Haitian-Caribbean art criticism, curation, and archiving. He also serves on the executive team of The Contemporary Art Week in Haiti.
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