Christian Sanna (b.1989, Malagasy-Italian)
Lives and work in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Christian Sanna is an artist whose practice is rooted in photography, yet extends far beyond the traditional frame. With a distinctly poetic and contemplative approach, Sanna explores the complex emotional terrain of human existence through nuanced images that embrace ambiguity, and the intimate rituals of everyday life. His work navigates the porous boundaries between the personal and the collective, to capture moments that are unseen but deeply flet, often engaging the photographic medium as both a documentary and fictional device.

Sanna's oeuvre is marked by an insistence on slowness and duration—many of his series are developed over the span of several months or years, and involve rigorous processes of observation, collection, and sequencing. Working primarily with analog cameras and films, his prints and sculptural installations of accumulated photographs reflect a profound engagement with the materiality of memory and the ethics of looking. Through repetition, fragmentation, and formal restraint, Sanna creates spatial narratives that invite reflection as much as they resist resolution.

His ongoing project Mihavasoka noho ny masoandro (2013, present), photographed in the Nosy Be region of Madagascar, articulates a deeply personal yet elusive relationship to place, time, and cultural memory. In contrast to the detached gaze of ethnographic documentation, Sanna’s lens is imbued with a sense of intimacy and longing, what he has described as a "research of what is missing". This sensibility was present in his first work Boys Dream, a lyrical exploration of Morengy, a traditional Malagasy martial art, where the tension between strength and vulnerability becomes a meditation on masculinity and collective identity. In The Line, Sanna turns his gaze outward, tracing the spectral geography of the French Aéropostale through archival fragments and subjective mappings, questioning how modern mythologies are constructed and internalized.

Christian Sanna’s work has been exhibited and collected internationally. With an acute sensibility for the metaphysical potential of photography, he stands among a new generation of artists redefining the medium as a site for philosophical inquiry, emotional resonance, and critical poetics.