Paris Noir: Artistic circulations and anti-colonial resistance, 1950 – 2000

From the creation of the Présence Africaine review to that of Revue noire, the group exhibition Paris Noir (Black Paris) retraces the presence and influence of Black artists in France from the 1950s to 2000. The exhibition celebrates 150 artists coming from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean, whose works have often never been displayed in France before.

Paris Noir 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.

centrepompidou.fr