For the first time in Anatsui’s metal practice, the constructive logic of the bottle-cap works is fully reciprocal: conceived and displayed as double-sided, the sculptures offer no privileged face. The caps’ reverse resolves into shimmering, monochromatic planes of modulated silver, set in counterpoint to the earthy chromatic register of browns, blacks, ochres and oxidised reds that distinguish the opposite branded surfaces. Suspended freely in space or attached loosely to the wall, this bilateral condition unsettles any fixed orientation, drawing attention to the mode of construction itself: innumerable bottle caps cut, flattened, folded and sutured into accretive sections with copper wire, their exposed joinery bringing thickness, porosity and seam into view.

The formal propositions advanced by the metal works emerge from a longer trajectory in which Anatsui’s engagement with sculpture has, from the outset, been shaped by a sustained and exacting attention to material conditions and the possibilities they afford. Born in 1944 in the former Gold Coast, Anatsui was educated at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where his training was structured within a predominantly British colonial academic framework orientated towards Western modernist models. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria to take up a teaching position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka – an institution that had by then emerged as a vital site for post-independence debates around artistic form, material practice and cultural identity. There, Anatsui entered an intellectually charged and interdisciplinary milieu of artists, writers and thinkers engaged in a collective reassessment of inherited conventions, animated by the search for alternative models of artmaking adequate to post-independence realities.

The circular wood plaques from the early 1970s, prior to his move to Nigeria, marked Anatsui’s first decisive departure from academic convention. Repurposing the utilitarian trays found in Ghanaian markets, Anatsui relocated sculptural attention from volume to surface, carving linear signs, informed by the graphic grammar of Adinkra – an Akan symbolic system through which proverbs and philosophical concepts are given visual form – into the planar wooden supports. Soon after, Anatsui turned to clay, a shift that opened new formal possibilities and enabled a more radical rethinking of sculptural objecthood than the plaques could sustain.

In the terracotta works of the late 1970s, including the pivotal ‘Broken Pots’ series, Anatsui worked through processes of fracture and reassembly, producing vessels from assorted fragments of clay, roughly patched and joined so that their seams remained exposed. The resulting forms, whose integrity is never fully secured, refuse the logic of restoration to an original state. What emerges instead is a mode of making in which breakage and reconstitution are treated as productive operations – an approach that registers the pressures of the post-independence moment within which Anatsui was working. As he later observed, ‘the idea of breaking is an opportunity for reformation. Breaking is not destruction but a necessity for rebirth.’1 Such an understanding finds its counterpart in the Akan principle of Sankofa – ‘to go back and retrieve’ – a concept that threads through Anatsui’s practice and speaks to a wider postcolonial conviction that the past remains a vital resource for building anew. In the metal works, this inherited sensibility is neither literalised nor resolved, but rescaled: fragmentation operates as an organising principle, with seams, joins and accretive units structuring expansive surfaces that suspend closure and remain contingent on site, orientation and display.

This commitment to form as structurally open – so fully articulated in the metal works and constituting a key tenet in Anatsui’s sculptural thinking – has clear antecedents in the wood reliefs that he developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and with which he has recently reengaged. Returning to wood, Anatsui worked with salvaged hardwood planks, cutting, burning, carving into their surfaces with power tools whose blunt force and graphic imprint became integral to the works’ visual and structural language. Like the ‘Broken Pots’, and in ways that anticipate the metal works, these reliefs refute the idea of a unified sculptural mass in favour of construction through parts: discrete wooden elements set side by side, their surfaces differentiated by incision, scorch, pigment and grain. Crucially, the reliefs were conceived as mutable assemblies, their constituent planks capable of being reordered so that each presentation generated a distinct articulation. While the rigidity of wood necessarily constrained this variability, the reliefs nonetheless established a principle that is granted even greater latitude in the metal works, where form is determined anew through orientation, drape, gravity and environment, allowing aspects such as contour, scale and spatial disposition to remain perpetually in play.

What becomes newly insistent in the works unfolding across Hong Kong and Seoul is not simply their now-familiar alchemy of discarded matter nor metamorphosis as an end in itself, but the clarity with which the conditions that enable transformation are brought into view. Where Anatsui’s earliest metal works Man’s Cloth and Woman’s Cloth (1999–2002) – conceived after he discovered a sack of discarded liquor bottle caps while out walking – marked the threshold at which his metal practice came into being, and later monumental installations such as Logoligi Logarithm (2019) tested the expansive, environmental reach of that proposition, the sculptures presented here recalibrate this enquiry around singular, upright forms that can appear to hover autonomously in space. Though they present as flat and self-contained, their surfaces are punctuated by small apertures, circular voids and irregular interruptions – points at which wire, absence or raw structure briefly assert themselves.

This being their first presentation, the sculptures are nonetheless conceived with the expectation that they will continue to shapeshift, assume new configurations, and register differently over time. In Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor’s comprehensive study of Anatsui’s practice, The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022), these successive iterations are recognised as ‘new shapes’, each constituting ‘distinct markers in the evolving life of an entity that theoretically has the potentiality to live forever’.2 In Hong Kong, the presentation appears under the title ‘MivEvi’, a reworking of the Ewe word for fragrance. Paired with the translation of Hong Kong as ‘fragrant harbour’, a name rooted in its history as a trading hub for incense and other aromatics, the title conceptually entwines the exhibition site with the animating principle that runs through the works. Operating within a cyclical conception of time, in which each installation marks a moment of return rather than finality, Anatsui’s practice gives form to an understanding long affirmed in West African philosophy: that no condition is permanent.

Source: White Cube

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As one of Kenya’s leading contemporary artists, Otieno is known for her large – scale public installations across Nairobi, including works situated outside Garden City Mall and at several of the city’s train stations. Working across wood, metal, and mixed media, her semi-abstract forms explore layered narratives of history, memory, human interaction, and environmental survival.

Featured in the exhibition are recent works created during a residency at El Anatsui Studio in Temu, Ghana, in summer 2025. Sculptures made from fragments of wooden canoes bear traces of memory and passage; some are hinged to resemble books, evoking the turning of a page and the opening of a new chapter.

Also included are new works produced at the artist’s studio in Karen, Nairobi — located within a larger art centre she both designed and built—centred around railway sleepers: historic timbers tied to East Africa’s colonial past. More than 150 years old, these timbers travelled from India to Kenya in the late nineteenth century to construct railway lines, carrying with them the stories of travellers,labourers, and communities.

Otieno’s process is intuitive and deeply responsive, guided by the scars, weight, and presence of her materials. Together, these works function as vessels of remembrance and renewal, grounding social and historical reflection in physical form.

Maggie Otieno (b. 1974) is based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Kenya, the UAE, Egypt, South Africa, Ethiopia, and the UK. Her public installations include works commissioned by Kenya Railways and The Eastern and Southern African Trade & Development Bank. Her duo exhibition Solace in Soil at Efie Gallery (Dubai, 2024) reflected her ongoing dialogue with material and memory. In 2023, she was included in Anthropocene Museum 9.0 by Cave Bureau, curated by Tosin Oshinowo for the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. She studied Art and Design at the Creative Art Centre in Nairobi and later focused on sculpture influenced by mentorships and an evolving interest in form and material voice. In addition to her studio practice, Otieno is an active mentor and arts educator, frequently hosting emerging artists in her Nairobi studio, located within The Bric-A-Bac in Karen, an art centre that she both designed and built.

Source: Efie Gallery

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Art Paris is committed to addressing the issues of our contemporary world, exploring themes entrusted to guest curators. Accompanied by a catalogue presenting the work of each selected artist, these themes guide visitors throughout the fair.

In 2026, two themes take central stage:

Babel – Art and Language in France by Loïc Le Gall
Babel – Art and Language in France is a themed visit through Art Paris 2026 that brings together 21 artists selected from the participating galleries and whose work explores the richness and, at times, the enigmas of systems of signs and linguistic structures in French contemporary art. According to Loïc Le Gall: “Some artists explore the material nature of letters themselves, whereas others examine the tension that exists between text and images, or tackle themes such as translation, the ambiguity of signs, the many and varied alphabets and the way in which words circulate across networks. The ensemble proves that art is a laboratory where the forms of language are observed and analysed, sometimes used in new contexts and often reinvented. Featuring creations that waver between figuration and abstraction, this themed visit is an invitation to rethink our relationship with words and symbols and the way in which, both individually and collectively, we construct and decode the reality of our surroundings.”

Art historian and exhibition curator Loïc Le Gall has been the director of the Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brest since 2019, having previously worked at the Centre National des Arts Plastiques and Centre Pompidou from 2013 to 2019. In parallel, from 2018 to 2019, he was in charge of Bonnevalle, an initiative in favour of young artists based in Noisy-le-Sec. Since 2011, he has organised around fifty exhibitions in different venues around France and abroad, including solo shows by Reda Boussella, Michele Ciacciofera, Rafael Domenech, Alia Farid, Apostolos Georgiou, Fanny Gicquel, Han Bing, Nathanëlle Herbelin, Laura Henno, Hoda Kashiha, Liang Yuanwei, Caroline Mesquita, Hanako Murakami, Luiz Roque, Sean Scully, Achraf Touloub and Philomena Williamson…. He is a regular contributor to contemporary art journals, books and catalogues.

Reparation by Alexia Fabre
Alexia Fabre sets out to explore contemporary art through the perspective of reparation, taking as her starting point twenty international artists selected from among the participating galleries. Reparation is a broad term whose accepted meaning differs in scope and sense from one artist to another, depending on questions of culture and time. By making connections between the past, present and future, reparation evokes notions such as care, kindness and time spent preserving objects, ideas, people and stories. It aims to put snippets and fragments back together, while treating both physical and symbolic wounds. It hints at injuries, wars, absences, suffering and oblivion, alluding to silences and the injustices of history, as well as the desire to project this new and “entirely” reconstructed element into the future. Reparation conveys the idea of restoring oneself, restoring a story, or a reality that once was. It can be visible, highlighting its existence by a scar, or transparent. It can be a master of illusion and disappear, effacing its reality. Reparation permeates both the personal and private sphere and the state of the world itself, sometimes forging ties between the two. If the notions of debt and compensation are one sense of the term, reparation signifies above all resistance, resilience and reinvention. It is the implementation of a relationship that champions the desire to pursue further, a desire to make something last that expresses a need for dialogue and understanding with the recipient of reparation ; sometimes even a dialogue with oneself.

Alexia Fabre is executive director of the Centre Pompidou Francilien in Massy. As a heritage curator she was previously in charge of running the project for the creation of the MAC VAL contemporary art museum. Amongst other activities, Alexia Fabre was artistic director of the Nuit Blanche Paris in 2009 and 2011 (together with Frank Lamy) and of the Biennale l’Art de la Joie in Quebec in 2017. She co-curated La lune-du voyage réel aux voyages imaginaires at the RMN Grand Palais in 2019 alongside Philippe Malgouyres and was the president of Videomuseum, the professional network of public collections of modern and contemporary art, from 2018 to 2022. She has taught at the École du Louvre and been a member of the Musée National d’Art Moderne acquisitions committee, associate curator at Grand Paris Express, president of the Prix Dauphine pour l’Art Contemporain and a member of the Prix Emerige. From 2022 to March 2025, she directed the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she defended the values of diversity and inclusivity, the recognition of artists and their implication in society and present-day issues. In 2024 – 2025, she curated the 17th Biennale de Lyon – Les voix des fleuves / Crossing the water.

Promises: a sector focusing on young galleries and emerging artists
The Promises section is dedicated to galleries established less than ten years ago. It will welcome 27 galleries and offer a forward-looking insight into cutting-edge contemporary art. Participating galleries may present up to three artists. This section is supported by the fair, allowing for reduced exhibitor fees, with an all-inclusive rate of €10,000 (excluding VAT) for a 20m² booth. The Promises section is located in the southern balconies of the Grand Palais. Marc Donnadieu, member of the Art Paris selection committee and independent exhibition curator, will oversee the curatorial direction of the Promises section. This section also benefits from prominent visibility across the fair’s communication channels and promotional materials.

Marc Donnadieu is an independent exhibition curator and art critic. He has been curator in chief at Photo Élysée (Musée Cantonal pour la Photographie, Lausanne), after previously working as curator of contemporary art at LaM Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, d’Art Contemporain et d’Art Brut (2010-2017) and director of the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain de Haute-Normandie (1999-2010). He has curated or co-curated a number of major exhibitions, both solo shows and themed exhibits in the field of contemporary photography, drawing practices, present-day representations of the body in art, identity processes at work in society today, the relationship between art and architecture and between photography and art brut. He has been a member of the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art (AICA) since 1997 and has contributed to numerous French and international periodicals, including Art Press with which he has been working since 1994. He has also taken part in the elaboration of several dozen catalogues, monographs and themed publications in the fields of the visual arts, architecture, design and fashion.

Solo Show: in favour of monographic exhibitions
Art Paris actively encourages the presentation of monographic exhibitions throughout the fair in the general and Promises sections. These solo shows offer visitors the opportunity to discover—or rediscover in depth—the work of modern, contemporary, or emerging artists. Solo Show receive dedicated attention in the fair’s promotional campaigns and communications.

French Design Art Edition: a sector devoted to design and contemporary decorative arts
After the resounding success of its first edition in 2025, the Design sector is returning to the balconies on the north side of the Grand Palais nave with an even richer selection that includes new great names of design and interior design. Curated by exhibition curators and Le FRENCH DESIGN directors Jean-Paul Bath and Sandy Saad, the sector will host eighteen exhibitors (interior designers, designers, design companies and galleries specialising in design) presenting of one-off designs and limited series.

The BNP Paribas Banque Privée Prize. A Focus on the French Scene
The BNP Paribas Banque Privée Prize. A Focus on the French Scene (with prize money totalling €40,000) was jointly launched in 2024 by BNP Paribas Banque Privée and Art Paris. It rewards a living artist active on the French art scene. For its 3rd edition, the winner will be selected from among the artists exhibiting in Babel: Art and Language in France curated by Loïc le Gall.

The jury members: Fabrice Bagne, director of BNP Paribas Banque Privée in France, Valérie Duponchelle, journalist and art critic, Loïc Le Gall, guest curator at Art Paris 2026 and director of Passerelle, contemporary art centre in Brest, Christine Macel, heritage curator, Vera Michalski, president of Libella publishing group and the Jan Michalski Foundation, Alfred Pacquement, independent exhibition curator, Guillaume Piens, fair director at Art Paris, Floriane de Saint-Pierre, President of the Amis du Centre Pompidou

The Her Art Prize: an international reference award for Women Artists in partnership with Marie Claire and Boucheron
Initiated by Marie Claire, a leading magazine committed to supporting women’s causes, and launched in partnership with Boucheron in 2025, the Her Art Prize aims to highlight outstanding women artists. A distinguished jury will select a winner from among the women artists represented by galleries participating in the 2026 edition of the fair. The winner will receive a €30,000 prize, awarded by Boucheron during a special evening event at the Grand Palais on Saturday 11 April 2026. In addition, Marie Claire and Art Paris will organize an international media campaign to promote the winning artist’s work. The prize celebrates both an exceptional career and a body of work that pushes artistic boundaries.

Art Paris: the first sustainably designed art fair
Art Paris was the first art fair in 2022 to develop a sustainable approach to its organisation based on a life cycle assessment (LCA)*. This pioneering approach made possible thanks to the help of Karbone Prod, will be renewed in 2026.

Paris: the place to be!
Paris is in the midst of an exceptional period of cultural and artistic renaissance illustrated by the opening of new galleries and venues, the renovation of existing cultural institutions and the inauguration of new ones. More than ever, the City of Light is asserting its role as “the place to be” for contemporary art. The activities on offer as part of the VIP programme, reserved for collectors and art professionals bear witness to the transformation of Paris’s art scene.

Making contemporary art accessible to all
Art Paris is dedicated to making contemporary art accessible to the widest audience, offering some 169 guided tours of the fair as well as a number of specific tools, in particular its elaborate yet eminently practical website which presents a virtual visit of the fair and filters allowing visitors to search for works by artist, price, geographical provenance and technique…

Source: Art Paris

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Encompassing more than 100 works, and spanning four decades, the exhibition reflects the full spectrum of Ryan’s practice, showcasing her multifaceted work across sculpture, textiles and works on paper and illuminating a distinctive, highly evocative, visual language. Significantly, the exhibition features recently rediscovered works from the 1980s – large-scale sculptures made from plaster and beaten lead, as well as vivid drawings – which reveal an enduring deep interest in psychology, memory and personal stories, while also connecting to wider themes around the environment, history, trauma and recovery.

Ryan is known for her long-standing interest in the intricate structures and patterns of the natural world. In her work, seeds and pods hold significant but ambiguous meaning as protective vessels for new life, as well as enclosed containers associated with confinement or evolution. Ryan is also interested in exploring the invisible aspects of human experience; the unseen forces that shape the inner workings of the mind. Her work is conceptually and texturally rich as well as culturally and materially diverse. She employs a range of traditional materials such as plaster, bronze and marble in her work – drawing on skills and techniques gleaned in her academic training in the 1970s and ‘80s at London’s Slade School of Fine Art amongst other institutions – alongside crafts such as crochet and quilting – part of an intergenerational artistic legacy handed down from her mother.

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations offers audiences a unique opportunity to engage with the full spectrum of Ryan’s work and trace the development of a groundbreaking practice that defies any singular or linear narrative.

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations has been principally and generously supported by The Colwinston Charitable Trust.

About Veronica Ryan
Veronica Ryan (b.1956, Plymouth, Montserrat) studied at St. Albans College of Art and Design, Bath Academy of Art in Corsham Court, The Slade School of Art at University College, London, and The School of Oriental and African Studies at London University. Over her forty-year career, she has been the subject of numerous exhibitions and residencies within the U.K., the U.S., and abroad. Her first one-person exhibition was at Arnolfini, Bristol in 1987. Other important one-person shows have been presented at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (1988), Camden Arts Centre, London (1995), Aldrich Museum, Connecticut (1996), Salena Gallery, Brooklyn (2005), Tate St Ives (2000, 2005 and 2017), The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh (2011), The Art House, Wakefield, (2017) and Spike Island, Bristol (2021). Ryan’s exhibition Unruly Objects was presented at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St Louis and Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio (2025-26). Her work is in many private and public collections such as the Tate, the Brooklyn Museum, the Arts Council Collection, Contemporary Art Society, Sainsbury’s Collection, the Hepworth Wakefield, and the Weltkunst Collection at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Ryan currently lives and works both in New York and in the U.K.

Source: Whitechapel Gallery

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Hayoun’s work continues to interrogate contemporary politics through the lens of his North African heritage and the stories of people he observes in daily life. His paintings document the shock waves of colonial violence, an increasingly volatile global political landscape and the devastating impact on the lives of society’s most vulnerable. They also pay tribute to everyday acts of courage; the woman who watches over workers in an LA parking lot, the coalition of activists behind the Freedom Flotilla Coalition attempting to bring aid to the starving people of Gaza. Each pastel hued painting is an act of defiance against hopelessness.

Living in Los Angeles at a time of rising authoritarianism in the US, this body of work depicts scenes from the frontline of anti-ICE demonstrations. A monumental triptych, the largest work the artist has produced, shows the moment of his arrest at its centre, while the left and right panels pay tribute to the long history of immigrants who have built new lives in the face of prejudice and harassment. Some of these figures wear the mask of the crone from Japanese Noh opera, an old woman believed to haunt those who have wronged her from beyond the grave. Justice – a common theme in Hayoun’s work – is demanded by marchers holding placards that speak of an ever-widening economic inequality.

Hayoun’s grandmother, a recurring symbol of strength and resistance, appears in multiple works, preparing fiery harissa – the fuel of rebellion – and ensuring the past is not forgotten. The artist’s grandfather turns to face us as he leaves with his suitcase; uprooted yet again, in permanent exile from his Egyptian homeland. In another canvas, he sits alongside Hayoun who upends the table in frustration at the archaic structures keeping the same people in power. Originally conceived as a way to paint ghosts, Hayoun’s signature blue unites all of his figures across time and place, signifying how quickly the present becomes the past and as such, how much each moment matters.

Sown with symbols of hope and solidarity such as the endangered monarch butterfly, who people around the world are helping conserve, the lighthouse of Alexandria, the Palestinian watermelon and recipes and photographs from his own family archive, Hayoun’s paintings encourage us to consider the ways in which we are woven together and remember our shared humanity.

Hayoun was born in 1987 and lives and works in Los Angeles, USA. His work has been acquired by the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva and Her Highness Princess Nauf Bendar Al Saud.

Source: Larkin Durey

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Born in Chicago, and raised in Los Angeles, Nengudi was a key figure in the avant-garde Black art scenes both in Los Angeles and New York during the 1960s and 1970s that were characterised by their radical experimentation, collective practices and social commentary. Nengudi’s influential and groundbreaking works sit at the intersection of sculpture, choreography and performance and draw on a range of African, Asian and Native American art forms.

The presentation focuses on a selection of Nengudi’s most iconic works made between 1972 and 1982 – a pivotal moment in her artistic development. During this period, Nengudi refined both her approach and creative forms, building on a background in dance and art. She was also influenced by avant-garde collectives and practices including Fluxus, the Gutai group, Yoruba mythology, Japanese Noh theatre and jazz improvisation. Her distinctive and evocative sculptural forms were assembled from a variety of found objects and materials such as hosiery, sand, rocks, seed pods, masking tape and paper, and designed to be animated by spontaneous or choreographed interactions, creating powerful participatory works.

Works on display include original photographs of Nengudi’s seminal work, R.S.V.P. (1976), as well as a film of a later performance of the piece. R.S.V.P. comprises an evolving series of works combining sculptural forms with performance activations; it was her first that used nylon tights as the primary material. After the birth of her first child, Nengudi became intrigued by the changes in her own body and the societal impact on women’s body image following childbirth. Her use of hosiery is significant, referencing gender constructs, but also, through the elasticity and flexibility of the material, operating as a potent symbol of resilience and subversion. The tights were pulled, twisted, knotted and filled with sand, tethered to gallery walls or stretched across the space evoking cavernous womb-like structures or body parts such as breasts or bellies. R.S.V.P. provided an immersive and sensual arena for physical interaction and Nengudi invited frequent collaborator – dancer and choreographer Maren Hassinger – to activate the work through movement.

R.S.V.P. is shown alongside photographic documentation of other performance works including Performance Piece (1977) and Performance with Inside Outside (1978), to further illuminate the development of Nengudi’s engagement with flexibility and tension. The presentation also includes a triptych of photographs from Nengudi’s Spirit Flags series, an important body of work created in New York in the early 1970s, that paved the way for the later performance works. The flag-like forms, hung outdoors in alleyways and across fire escapes, were animated and set in motion by the wind, rain and other environmental factors, igniting the artist’s interest in how external forces affect the movement and form of objects.

Also on display is a film capturing the collaborative work Air Propo (1982), an improvised performance by Nengudi with dancer, vocalist and performer Cheryl Banks Smith and musician Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris. Alongside the performances of Banks Smith and Morris, Nengudi practices circular breathing techniques, transforming her own body into an instrument. The work was made for the pioneering gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM) in New York. A dedicated and significant space for African American artists and artists of colour to present their work, JAM demonstrated the ethos of improvisation and collaboration vital for performance-makers at this moment. Nengudi was also part of a close-knit community of Black artists in Los Angeles, including Maren Hassinger and David Hammons, collectively known as Studio Z. A key part of their work was to facilitate communal spaces for African American artists to experiment with forms and practices outside the mainstream art world.

This exhibition marks the first solo presentation of Senga Nengudi in a public gallery in London, following her 2018 survey exhibition at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, and Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. It is shown alongside a major survey of Veronica Ryan at Whitechapel Gallery, putting the two artists in dialogue and highlighting Nengudi’s influence on Ryan’s work.

Source: Whitechapel Gallery

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From this perspective, the artist does not view education as a stable or strictly institutional system; rather, he approaches it as a fragmentary experience, shaped by human relationships, social environments, and the realities of everyday life

As such, the exhibition moves through different spaces of learning: the family, the street, the community, and the classroom. These scenes—sometimes intimate, sometimes collective—reveal the multiple forms of knowledge transmission, ranging from ordinary gestures and lived experiences to formal educational systems. Here, learning appears less as an acquired state than as a continuous process, shaped by social expectations, uncertainties, and aspirations.

This reflection is also expressed through the artist’s visual language. Prosper’s practice revolves around a technique he calls Abfillage, a visual language that combines figurative painting, abstraction and collage. Figures emerge from surfaces composed of fragments of newspapers and printed images, transforming bodies into living archives where personal narratives intersect with collective histories. These materials, drawn from the press and the circulation of information, remind us that knowledge is also constructed through public discourse and the social realities that shapes our lives.

In these scenes of learning, another element stands out for its subtlety: the absence of screens. The characters move through a world where knowledge still circulates through books, paper, speech, and the presence of bodies. By privileging these tangible supports, the artist emphasizes the slow and attentive dimension of learning, reminding us that knowledge is also rooted in the materiality of words, in the repeated gestures of reading, and in the shared time between those who transmit knowledge and those who learn.

At the heart of these compositions appear portraits of people the artist has encountered or lived alongside throughout his journey. Above their heads appears a small golden crown, a recurring motif in his work that grants these figures a form of symbolic nobility and affirms the dignity of those who, often invisibly, sustain the transmission of knowledge. The bodies—deliberately disproportionate, with elongated silhouettes and reduced heads—also constitute a visual signature of the artist. By disrupting the usual hierarchy of portraiture, Prosper shifts the viewer’s attention and invites us to consider the body as a whole—a place of experience, memory, and learning.

This exploration of visible and invisible forms of knowledge thus extends into the exhibition space. As part of his residency in Côte d’Ivoire to prepare for the exhibition, the artist developed an installation entitled The Weight of Knowledge. This life-size sculpture, a metaphor for the social and intellectual expectations that accompany access to education, depicts a student carrying a stack of books stretching as far as the eye can see. Made up of newspapers covered in resin and pages filled with students’ own reflections on education and their expectations, these books become fragments of collective memory.

The creation of this installation also led to a collaboration with two students from the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Lydia Matiégou-Keita and Chahid El Batti, who came to complete their final year internship with the artist. Their participation is fully in line with the exhibition’s theme, where the transmission of knowledge is experienced as much in the acts of creation as in the exchanges between generations.

Through Fragments of Knowledge, Prosper shares his vision of education and the realities it encompasses. The artist explores the hopes it inspires, as well as the social pressures, family expectations, and inequalities that accompany it. Learning appears here as a trajectory that is both personal and collective, shaped by the responsibilities, ambitions, and hopes that societies place in each generation.

Source: LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery

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The exhibition’s title is inspired by the concept developed by Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994), an Afro-Brazilian intellectual whose work-articulating gender, race, and class in an innovative manner and in accessible language-opened paths toward a more critical view of the African foundations of the aesthetic and sociocultural formation of the Americas. Trained as a philosopher and active in the Black movement, Gonzalez was one of the principal formulators of Black feminism in Brazil, anticipating many of today’s central debates in cultural, racial, and gender studies. As philosopher Angela Davis remarked during a visit to Brazil in 2019. “Why do you need to look for a reference in the United States? I learn more from Lélia Gonzalez than you do from me.”

By renaming the Americas with an “f” that incorporates Africa, Gonzalez proposed more than a neologism: she named a relational, political, and aesthetic cartography that reorganizes the meanings of belonging, ancestry, and creation.

In Gonzalez’s words:
“The marks that confirm the Black presence in the cultural construction of the American continent led me to think about the need to develop a category that was not just limited to the case of Brazil and which, effecting a broader approach, took into account the requirements of interdisciplinarity. As such, I began to reflect on the category of Americanity.”

Améfrica does not take us back to Africa but transforms us on its basis. From music to cuisine, from spirituality to the visual arts, from philosophy to fashion, Africa has been— and continues to be-recreated in multiple forms and gestures in the Americas over the past five centuries. From performance and abstract sculpture to figurative painting and geometric explorations, American forms manifest themselves whenever Afrocentric cultural dynamics-“in their more or less conscious expressions”— are established.

In this sense, Améfrica critically questions old concepts of miscegenation and syncretism and decenters Europe as the primary reference point in the constitution of the New World: “The so-called Latin America… is actually much more Amerindian and American than anything else.” In dialogue with broader currents of Pan-Africanism, the concept also offers an expanded perspective of this movement, marking both affinities and differences between Africa and its diasporas, while taking the latter as a place of enunciation.

“In addition to its purely geographical character, the category of Americanity incorporates a whole historical process of intense cultural dynamics (adaptation, resistance, reinterpretation and creation of new forms) that is Afrocentric…. Its methodological value, in my view. lies in the fact that it allows the possibility of reviving a specific unity, historically forged within different societies that were formed in a certain part of the world.”

Taking the concept with its methodological and poetic potentials, this exhibition weaves a dialogue among artists of different generations, geographies, and gestures who, through their networks of interconnection, register and recreate the African continent’s historical, formal, visual, symbolic, and intellectual influences on the American continent, both past and present, and vice versa. The exhibition results from research into the works present in Jorge M. Pérez’s collection; within the many possibilities of selection that the catalogue offers, highlighting the formal, thematic, and contextual relationships among these artists brings to light the relevance and contemporaneity of the concept of Americanity. It allows us to glimpse a vast territory in which national borders become less determinant than the cultural, political, economic, and symbolic connections that span and interconnect Afro-Atlantic spaces, contexts (physical, spiritual, and dreamlike), societies, and artists.

The exhibition is organized in sections inspired by processes that Gonzalez identified as central to Americanity: Adaptation, Resistance, Reinterpretation, and Creation of New Forms, in addition to a section dedicated to portraits made by Amefricans.

Source: Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo

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Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation remarks: ‘We are pleased to celebrate The Gordon Parks Foundation’s twentieth anniversary with an exhibition at Alison Jacques in London. We are equally fortunate to view Gordon’s vast achievements through the critical lens of guest curator Bryan Stevenson. Bryan’s selection demonstrates the struggles and joys of African American life that Gordon captured, and reveals how he powerfully shaped the way America saw itself.’

Stevenson was named in the TIME100: World’s Most Influential People (2015), and has received the Martin Luther King Jr. Nonviolent Peace Prize (2018). He is the author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2015), which was awarded the Carnegie Medal by the American Library Association, and was made into a major HBO film starring Michael B. Jordan (2019).

Speaking about his curation of the exhibition, Stevenson says: ‘The scope of the images from Parks represents the struggle, resilience and constant striving of Black Americans.’ Stevenson’s selection spans 25 years of Parks’ practice (1942-1967) and focuses on Gordon Parks as a humanitarian with a deep commitment to social justice. Stevenson comments: ‘As an African American survivor of racial injustice, Parks was keenly aware of race and class in America, and this palpably informed his work.’

The exhibition title references the protest anthem, ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, evolving from the African American spiritual song ‘I Shall Not Be Moved’, which signifies unwavering resolve, and has become a cultural touchstone for movements seeking justice. The exhibition presents a timely parallel between Parks’ photographs and the current crisis in America. Stevenson articulates how we are living in ‘a moment when there is an intense and active effort of erasure, retreat from civil rights and silencing of Black voices and history in the United States’, and goes on to say how Parks’ images ‘provide insight and relevance to our current discourse. His work absolutely suggests resistance to bigotry and oppression.’

Parks is one of the most groundbreaking figures in twentieth century photography. Born into poverty and segregation, he had no professional training and was self-taught. In 1937, aged 25, Parks purchased a Voigtländer Brillant camera from a Pawn shop in Seattle for less than $12. He was first inspired by photographs of migrant workers which he saw in a magazine, and famously referred to his camera as a ‘weapon’ against poverty and social wrongs. Speaking to Eldridge Cleaver, an early leader of the revolutionary Black power organisation The Black Panther Party, Parks explained: ‘You have a 45mm automatic pistol on your lap, and I have a 35mm camera on my lap, and my weapon is just as powerful as yours’ (1970).

Stevenson’s curation includes some of Parks’ most well known works, including American Gothic, Washington, D.C. (1942) and photographs of the 1963 March on Washington, including his portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. making his canonical speech ‘I Have a Dream’. The show includes iconic works Outside Looking In, Department Store and Mr and Mrs Albert Thornton, from Parks’ ‘Segregation in the South’ series, commissioned by Life Magazine published under the title ‘The Restraints: Open and Hidden’ (1956). Hired in 1948, Parks broke racial barriers as the first Black staff member of America’s leading photo magazine. Unusually for a photographer, Parks often wrote his own articles, allowing him to inject his personal perspective and challenge stereotypes. His ‘Segregation in the South’ series humanised the effects of Jim Crow segregation by following the daily lives of Black families in Alabama, creating narratives that consistently expressed the dignity and complex humanity of his subjects, starkly contrasting with mainstream representations.

Stevenson’s essay, ‘The Lens of Gordon Parks: A Different Picture of Crime in America’, published by Steidl (2020), focused on Parks’ series the ‘Atmosphere of Crime’ (1967). A number of images from this body work are shown in the exhibition, including Untitled, Chicago (1957) in which Parks photographed a prison inmate’s hand protruding from the bars of his cell, holding a lit cigarette. In his essay, Stevenson analyses how Parks’ photography, rooted in his own experience with racism and poverty, offered a deeper, compassionate look at crime, revealing systemic issues and human suffering rather than just sensationalism. In doing so, Parks’ images shift the narrative from blaming individuals to understanding societal causes, and Stevenson highlights the artist’s unique ability to see shared humanity, connecting his work to the broader fight for racial justice and dignity, challenging simplistic views of crime in America.

Gordon Parks’ work is held in major museums including: The Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; The Met, New York; MFA Boston and Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Other major acquisitions include over 200 works at Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, and in 2019, MoMA, New York acquired 56 works.

Source: Alison Jacques

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Since theatrical performances were rarely recorded and many of the movies that featured all-Black casts are now considered “lost films” (films for which no copy is known to survive), advertising posters often provide the only remaining evidence of the most important productions featuring Black performers between the 1870s and the 1940s. The posters in this exhibition allow viewers to consider how Black storytelling was transferred and transformed during its transition from stage to screen. They also document aspects of the historic innovations of playwrights, composers, directors, and producers for Black actors as they sought to represent life and experiences for Black audiences through their own creative perspectives.

Source: Poster House

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