Nanténé Traoré (*1993) is an artist and author who lives and works between Brussels and Paris. He’s represented by Galerie Sultana, in Paris, and published by Points, Hachette and Gorge Bleue (FR).

Nanténé tells stories with words as well as images. Borrowing from the storyteller his role as scribe, recounting both what has been and what is to come, he seeks as much to document the present as to create a new iconography of the intimate. Both his photographs and his texts tell stories of tenderness, transmission and freedom, often narrated by bodies in movement, fluid and non-normative.
Through an almost infinite repetition of images, gestures and words, it is also a question, particularly in his most recent work, of compensating for the immense vertigo of what is missing in the world. His latest photographs are like collections in which human traces hybridize with the void, allegories of absence and loss, fragile memories in which love, joy and melancholy coexist.

His photographic work has been shown in a number of solo and group exhibitions, including at the Fondation Louis Roederer for the Festival des Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles, at the Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in London, at Air de Paris in Romainville, at the Marcelle Alix Gallery in Paris, at Le Lieu Unique with the FRAC Pays de Loire in Nantes and at the Magasins Généraux in Pantin. Nanténé Traoré's work has won several awards, including the Prix Découverte des Rencontres d'Arles, the Prix Utopie, the Prix Mentor, the Prix Vonovia in Germany and the Prix Wort im Bild in Austria. In 2023, his photographic series Tu vas pas muter joined the CNAP collections.