The Haitian Canadian filmmaker transforms film, sound, and installation into living cartographies of loss, resistance, and community.
miryam charles. Courtesy of basis e.v.
In her first solo exhibition in Germany, ‘miryam charles: atlas for the disappeared’ at basis e. v. in Frankfurt brings together an expansive constellation of moving image installations, sound compositions, and personal archival materials. Spanning several rooms, the exhibition draws viewers into a sensorial world shaped by diasporic memory, intergenerational trauma, and the lingering presence of those erased or forgotten. Running from 12 September to 14 December 2025, this landmark show marks a new chapter in the artist’s practice, presenting a deeply immersive reimagining of her acclaimed film cette maison alongside a selection of earlier works.
Weaving films, voices, sound, and memory
For this presentation, miryam charles revisited cette maison, her 2022 hybrid film that moves between documentary, fiction, spectral presence, and imagined futures. Rather than screen the film in its traditional cinematic form, she deconstructed it into spatial fragments: projected scenes, mirrored passages, layered vignettes, and a multichannel sound environment. Her short films echo through the space as interwoven sonic textures and visual whispers. This approach transforms the exhibition into a polyphonic installation where images do not simply appear; they reverberate.
Across the galleries, sound becomes a guide and a medium of inquiry. Voices, whispers, field recordings, and personal audio notes travel between rooms, shaping a shifting atmosphere that carries the emotional weight of the works. These soundscapes are not merely background elements. They operate as connective tissue, revealing the entanglements between grief, remembrance, and diasporic identity. They draw attention to the spaces between words, the ruptures in testimony, and the vibrations that persist when language falters.
Cartographies of disappearance
The exhibition title, ‘atlas for the disappeared’, signals the artist’s long-standing interest in disappearance as both a political category and an emotional terrain. Her work often returns to the unspoken and the undocumented, tracing what is lost, taken, or withheld. In the context of Haitian history, disappearance resonates with state violence, migration, exile, and fractured genealogies. But charles approaches the topic with intimacy rather than spectacle. Instead of presenting disappearance as absence, she renders it a presence that pulses within bodies, landscapes, and memories.
Her installations map experiences that defy containment. They stretch across borders and temporal thresholds, moving between Haiti, Quebec, and the Caribbean, and are imagined elsewhere. Through the layering of image and sound, charles proposes a new kind of atlas: one that charts emotion, resonance, and relation rather than territory. This is an atlas written not on paper but in frequencies, gaps, and echoes. An atlas attuned to the disappeared, the displaced, and the drifting.
Polyphony as a tool for resistance
The polyphonic nature of the exhibition is central to its emotional and political force. Each film fragment carries multiple voices; each sonic layer introduces another dimension of meaning. The works do not seek to resolve the complexity of diasporic life. Instead, they hold contradictions that mirror its lived realities. Pain and tenderness, rupture and continuity, solitude and community coexist in the same space.
By foregrounding multiplicity, charles resists the flattening tendencies often imposed upon Black and diasporic narratives. Her approach disrupts the expectation that trauma must be rendered plainly or directly. Instead, she positions nuance as a form of resistance. The decision to privilege resonance over explanation asks viewers to slow down, to listen, and to inhabit ambiguity. It also honours how diasporic communities preserve memory: collectively, through fragments, and across generations.
Sounding the cracks between images
Throughout the exhibition, attention is drawn to the cracks and gaps within narrative structures. By dispersing her films into spatial installations, charles reveals what lies beyond the frame. Sounds slip past the edges of projected images. Shadows create unintended compositions. In some rooms, the light of a film flickers against bare walls, suggesting the presence of something or someone no longer visible. These ruptures become opportunities for imagination, inviting viewers to consider what might be missing or unspoken.
Songs, echoes, and faint resonances weave through the galleries, creating a continuous yet unpredictable rhythm. Some audio passages feel like lullabies, others like laments. The sonic archive becomes a living memorial that carries traces of the vanished, the mourned, and the remembered.
In the face of violent structures, the works create space for healing and defiance. They imagine a realm where diasporic experience is not marginal but central, not silenced but insistently audible.
Between image, imagination, and the unspoken
At basis e. v., charles demonstrates the full breadth of her artistic vocabulary. Her installations blur the lines between cinema, performance, ritual, and sound art. They operate through sensation and intuition as much as intellect. Viewers are invited not only to watch but to feel, listen, and absorb.
The exhibition underscores the artist’s ability to transform personal experience into collective resonance. Many of the stories she works with are deeply rooted in her family history. Yet through her treatment of sound, gesture, and spatial composition, they extend outward to address broader diasporic conditions: displacement, longing, resilience, and survival.
In assembling these threads, ‘atlas for the disappeared’ becomes both a memorial and a proposition. It reimagines how memory can be held and how histories of violence can be confronted without reproducing harm. It also affirms art’s potential to create spaces of refuge and connection in the aftermath of rupture.
‘miryam charles: atlas for the disappeared’ is on view at basis e. v., Frankfurt, from 12 September to 14 December 2025. For more information, visit basis-frankfurt.de.
