The Paris Noir exhibition immerses visitors in a cosmopolitan Paris that witnessed the decisive influence of black artists between 1950 and 2000.
This text was written by Alicia Knock, co-curator of the Paris Noir exhibition.
From the creation of the magazine Présence Africaine to that of Revue noire, the Paris noir exhibition traces the presence and influence of black artists in France between the 1950s and 2000. It highlights 150 artists, from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, whose work has rarely been shown in France.
Paris noir is a vibrant plunge into cosmopolitan Paris, a place of resistance and creation that gave rise to a wide variety of practices, from identity awareness to the search for transcultural plastic languages. From international abstractions to Afro-Atlantic abstractions, surrealism and free figuration, this historical journey reveals the importance of Afro-descendant artists in redefining modernity and postmodernity.
Four installations, produced specifically for the exhibition by Valérie John, Nathalie Leroy Fiévee, Jay Ramier and Shuck One, punctuate the tour, taking a contemporary look at this memory. At the center of the exhibition, a circular matrix takes up the motif of the Black Atlantic, an ocean that has become a disk, a metonym for the Caribbean and the "All-World", as Martinique poet Édouard Glissant put it, as a metaphor for the Parisian space. Attentive to circulations, networks and ties of friendship, the exhibition takes the form of a lively and often unpublished cartography of Paris.
MansA is supporting the Centre Pompidou by producing the soundtrack for the exhibition, organizing two festive events—Le Bal du Paris Noir and the Electric Makossa evening—which extend the exhibition, and finally by supporting the restoration and digitization of Sarah Maldoror's cinematographic work, a retrospective of which is being presented in conjunction with the exhibition.
