Echoing the Paris Noir exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, this meeting highlights the critical and decolonial pedagogies that have redefined pan-African artistic practices and influenced contemporary art education.
A discussion moderated by Eva Barois de Caevel, featuring Euridice Zaituna Kala and Pascale Marthine Tayou, will explore the tensions between institutional education systems and alternative pedagogies in post-independence Africa.
The meeting will be preceded by an afternoon of screenings based on historical rereadings of pan-African pedagogies, in the Amphi des loges from 2pm to 6pm.
During this afternoon of screenings, critical and committed films will be shown to the public, such as Performances Mensonges vérité by Sokey Edorh, a contemporary visual artist and filmmaker whose work is rooted in the social realities of Togo. The screening of Yankel, a documentary by Idrissa Diabaté at the heart of the social reality of the Vohou-vohou movement in Côte d'Ivoire, questions artistic transmission in a break with colonial frameworks. The decolonial approaches of Nigerian pioneer Demas Nwoko, revealed in a documentary by Andy Amadi Okoroafor, will also be discussed, as will the radical approaches of Senegalese artists Issa Samb and Bouna Medoune Seye, documented by Wasis Diop.
Euridice Zaituna Kala is an artist-teacher whose work addresses the historical and cultural transformations of memory (both personal and collective) as manipulated and appropriated material. She borrows a matrimonial approach from the visual vocabulary of archives, especially in relation to women's heritage, seeking traces of invisibilized subjectivities and communities. She is interested in the representation of ‘bodies, and in particular black and/or marginalized bodies’ and the material conditions of their existence (architectures, ecosystems, elements of care) with the aim of producing restorative and familiar gestures. Her work takes the form of installations, performances, images, objects and books.
A graduate in experimental photography from the Market Photo Workshop in Johannesburg (South Africa) in 2012 and the Asiko School in Maputo (Mozambique) in 2015, Euridice Zaituna Kala is a laureate of the Villa Vassilieff / ADAGP Fellowship (2019/2020). In 2023, she is in residence at the Villa Medicis in Rome, researching the Mozambican artist Bertina Lopes. She is currently presenting a solo exhibition at the Centre d'Art la Criée in Rennes, entitled Daylighting, and her work is also being shown in France this year in two group exhibitions, Tactical Specters at La ferme du buisson, Noisiel (March to July 2025) and Primavera, Primavera at FRAC Méca, Bordeaux (until May 25, 2025).
The artist Pascale Marthine Tayou is known to a wide international audience. Her work is characterized by its variability, and is not confined to one medium or one particular set of issues. Right from the start of her career, Pascale Marthine Tayou added an “e” to her first and middle names to give them a feminine ending, ironically distancing herself from the importance of artistic authorship and male/female attributions. The same applies to any reduction to a specific geographical or cultural origin. Her works not only mediate in this sense between cultures, or place man and nature in ambivalent relationships with each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural or political constructions. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou share a recurring characteristic: they evoke an individual moving around the world, exploring the question of the global village.
Eva Barois de Caevel is curator in the Contemporary Creation and Forecasting Department of the Musée National d'Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris. She lives in Seine-Saint-Denis and Loiret. She was awarded the Cnap Curatorial Research Grant in 2020 and the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award in 2014. She has published numerous texts in exhibition catalogs and specialist journals. Previously an independent curator, she has devoted herself to writing, curating, teaching, publishing and research in dialogue with a wide range of people. She has worked for the RAW Material Company art center in Dakar, curated the LagosPhoto Festival and was a member of the curatorial team at EVA International, the Irish biennial.
She has led projects with, among others, Cnap, MO.CO, le Capc, Bétonsalon, le Frac Sud, la Drac Île-de-France, la Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, Triangle-Astérides, les Tanneries, le Centre d'art Madeleine-Lambert, le Salon de Montrouge, le Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, le Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration, Artagon Pantin, La Galerie à Noisy-Le-Sec, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Frac Lorraine, Villa Médicis - Académie de France à Rome, Palais de Tokyo, Art Basel Paris+, Fondation Thalie, Collection Société Générale, AWARE.
