Fabiana Ex-Souza

FABIANA EX-SOUZA WAS BORN IN 1980 IN BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL. SHE LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS.

An Afro-Brazilian artist and researcher, she explores colonial wounds through a transatlantic lens, developing a multidisciplinary practice that blends sculpture, performance, video, installation, and photography. Her work is deeply tied to self-invention and healing.

Incorporating plant materials into her sculptures, she evokes rituals of transformation and repair. Her performances engage with the political dimension of art, tackling themes of hybridity, archival reactivation, transmission, and memory. By adopting the name “Ex-Souza,” she marks a rupture, re-signifying her family’s colonial legacy as a space of liberation. This perspective naturally led her to ecological care practices, which now play a central role in her artistic approach.

A graduate of the École Guignard in Belo Horizonte (2010), Ex-Souza earned a Master of Arts from Université Paris 8 in 2012 and is currently completing a PhD in Visual Arts and Photography at the same institution. Her work has gained rapid recognition: in 2022, she was nominated for the Pernod Ricard Foundation Prize before winning the COAL Plante! Art and Environment Prize. In 2023, she was awarded the French Ministry of Culture’s Mondes Nouveaux grant and later received the SUITE/CNAP prize for 2024-2025.

Her performances and installations have been showcased at major institutions and events, including the Dakar Biennale (2024), LaM – Lille Métropole Museum of Modern, Contemporary, and Outsider Art (2022), Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2023), Centre Pompidou (2016, 2019), Maison de l’Amérique Latine (2018), and Fondation Cartier (2015). Some of her works have recently entered public collections, including FRAC Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the Fonds d’Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris.