Paris Noir

“Black Paris” offers a vibrant immersion in a cosmopolitan Paris, a place of resistance  and creation that gave rise to a wide variety of practices, from a new awareness of identity  to the search for trans-cultural artistic languages. From international to Afro-Atlantic abstractions via surrealism and free figuration, this historical voyage reveals the importance of artists  of African descent in the redefinition of Modernisms and Post-modernisms.

Four installations produced especially for the exhibition by Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy Fiévee, Jay Ramier and Shuck One punctuate the visit and provide contemporary insights into this memory. At the centre, a circular matrix takes up the motif of the Black Atlantic, the ocean as a disk, a metonymy of the Caribbean and the “Whole-World”, to use the term coined by Martinican poet Edouard Glissant, as a metaphor for the Parisian space. Attentive to circulations, networks and friendships, the exhibition proposes a living and often entirely new map of Paris.