Gabrielle Manglou studied art at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and then at the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Marseille. Returning to Réunion in the early 2000s, she developed a polyphonic artistic approach combining drawing, video, installation and photography, with particular focus on archival images.

G. Manglou’s practice resists any kind of categorisation. It can be understood as an ongoing attempt to gather, transmit and give form to a collection of symbols, gestures, cultural crossings, objects and memories that evoke Creole identity, syncretism and the colonial legacy and also more generally express a determination to define one’s relationship to the world’s complexity through sensory experiences. Folding and unfolding, covering and revealing, digging and filling, involving and explaining, stitching and undoing, binding and unbinding: all these paired actions respond to each other across the artist’s visual repertoire of drawings, sculptures and objects. Her work is often seen as a system of visual and symbolic correspondences and bonds, functioning as a sensitive map that helps one navigate – or, alternatively, causes one to lose all sense of direction. Like clues, her assemblages of incongruous forms reveal associations echoing history and the other forms that surround them.

In 2018, with H.O.C. Hypothèse de l’Objet en Creux, G. Manglou began building upon a central notion that she calls “the materiality of history”. This project marked a turning point in her approach: assuming the role of an artist-researcher and collaborating with other disciplines, she started treating archival materials as a medium and combining investigation with artistic experimentation to explore how knowledge and narratives are constructed and passed on. Noting that Réunion’s founding history has left behind very few physical artefacts, the artist offers a poetic mode of storytelling that intertwines scientific information with vernacular knowledge and oral traditions with contemporary history. The aforementioned work H.O.C., which G. Manglou developed during a research residency working with Réunion’s departmental archives, resulted in a dual solo exhibition in 2018: “Simili” (Cité des Arts, Réunion) and “Placebo” (Archives Départementales).

This almost holistic approach permeates her entire practice and was also evident in the exhibition “Amarrer à l’Ombre” (2020), in which the artist occupied the powder magazine of the Port-Louis citadel in France’s Morbihan department. Her immersive installation, filled with objects as evocative as they are enigmatic, gave material form to the links – historical, biographical or poetic, and real or imagined – between this town in Brittany and the island of Réunion. In the following year, G. Manglou was invited to CAP – Centre d’Art Contemporain in Saint-Fons, for “Delicatolitho”, a solo exhibition presenting a range of “hybrid” objects in which “the intelligence inherent in gestures” (as the artist termed it) conversed with forms borrowed from nature. In 2024 Criée – Centre d’Art Contemporain in Rennes received G. Manglou and her project Les Merveilles. Topics including otherness, a sensitive approach to the environment and a form of relationship among all beings and things were central to this period of creation and sharing, conducted in a school context and presented with the title Les Enfants Paysages. At the same time, she collaborated on the edition of the silkscreen multiple Paralune, produced in partnership with the workshop La Presse Purée.

Rooted in a situated, decolonial perspective, her work shapes sensitive spaces in which memory and the poetry of gesture intersect – a gesture that is also a poetics of resistance. Works by G. Manglou belong to the public collections of FRAC Réunion, the Artothèque in Grand-Quevilly and the Artothèque in Réunion. She was included in the exhibition “Emanata*” showcasing works by artists selected for a Centre National des Arts Plastiques commission. In 2025 she won the Nouveau Regard Prize spearheaded by AWARE.