Love & Hate

Long Gallery Harlem is pleased to present new work by Alioune Lune Diagne. Diagne created Love & Hate while living in Harlem and completing his residency at Villa Albertine. In August 2024, Diagne came to Villa Albertine to research and create a performance for Senegalese boxer, Battling Siki. As serendipity would have it, his residency would coincide with The Battle for Hope, the inaugural boxing event created by Harlem House of Champions at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building. Diagne was moved by the competitiveness of the local boxers, the strong community support, and overall pageantry of the event. Love & Hate is metaphor for the struggles and triumphs of the diverse people, perspectives, and interests evident on a walk down Harlem’s 125th Street on any given day. Diagne is a visual artist, choreographer, and dancer who lives between Senegal and the Netherlands.

Artist on View

Alioune Diagne, known as Lune Diagne, is a multidisciplinary artist, visual artist, choreographer and dancer who lives between Senegal and the Netherlands. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Dakar from 2006 to 2007. At the end of 2007, he decided to devote himself to contemporary dance and continues to practice drawing and to take an active interest in the visual arts by collaborating with visual artists and creating performances around works that inspire him. For the past three years, after many years devoted to dance, Alioune has returned to the visual arts. In 2017, he created the video-performance about identity, "J'existe", a project conceived with kraft paper covered with writings of testimonies of stateless people in their own country, notably in Mauritania. This performance was presented at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, in Bilbao in Spain and in Brazil as part of the Ars Ventes festival in Tiradentes. Since 2018, Alioune has started a series of paintings and drawings on the facial expressions of the Senegalese riflemen massacred at the Thiaroye camp on 1 December 1944.