I Telman Nwè Ki I Blé (Si Noir Que Cela En Devient Bleu) - Valérie John

The monographic exhibition "I telman nwè ki i blé" (So black that it becomes blue) presents Valérie John's work since the 1990s and her return to Martinique, where she chose to establish her "atelier-oeuvre." This act is then a commitment to making art by immersing herself in her milieu and in dialogue with the place's translocal memory, in a gesture of evolving identity construction. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist offers a plunge into the metamorphoses of indigo, ranging from the deepest blue tones to the most brilliant black. She summons a palette charged with symbolisms linked to water, mourning, transatlantic memory, repair, and the alterity of bodies. Assemblages of papers and textiles, installations, garments, objects, and books unfold on the walls, on the floor, or suspended. This twilight crossing, nourished by the insular Martinican milieu, extends a research conducted since the early 1980s between France and West Africa around memory and its strata, based on textile objects such as the pagne. Fueled by the artisanal mastery of indigo dyeing, notably in Senegal where she still partly lives, Valérie John develops an art of palimpsest grounded in reusing materials, writing, and revealing thicknesses. From the textiles, books, papers, and documents she collects and transfigures, she makes the collective history tell its own story. For, in her words, to "become an anthropologist of oneself" is to "open oneself to all memories to weave." This exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo is organized in collaboration with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York.