A Chaos-Monde of Black Masterpieces
Demas Nwoko, Senegalese Woman, 1970, oil on panel, 91 × 61 cm. Photo: kó, Lagos, Nigeria. © the artist. Courtesy of New Culture foundation. All rights reserved
Shortly before opening, Paris Noir became mired in controversy when Guadeloupean curator Chris Cyrille accused the show’s lead curator, Alicia Knock, of appropriating his curatorial concept and research. His Instagram post sparked debate over Knock’s role as a white curator of France’s largest exhibition of Black art to date, conceived as responding to shared experiences of colonisation and the Middle Passage. Other historians and curators subsequently waded in. These tensions reflect both the difficulty of staging such an exhibition in a country that treats racial identity as a deviation from the civic norm – a framing that renders projects like Paris Noir at once exceptional and suspect – and the persistent entanglement of identity politics and individualism in an otherwise noble effort to present a fuller, more accurate history of globalised art: one in which Paris represents an important hub.
Organising over 300 works by 150 artists into 15 sections, the show is a veritable Chaos-Monde, to borrow Édouard Glissant’s term: a dense, unruly constellation of works in tension and dialogue – Surrealism, abstraction, street art and revolutionary aesthetics swirling in centrifugal excess. Yet the exhibition is also very Paris-centric (as most French art is). Consciously drawing on the titles of the Pompidou’s inaugural exhibitions Paris-New York (1977), Paris-Berlin (1978) and Paris-Moscow (1979), which sought to emphasise the city in relation to other modern art outposts, Paris Noir is nonetheless the first exhibition to centre the history of French colonial and outre-mer migrations to the ‘metropole’.
