Paris Noir: Pompidou’s landmark exhibition spotlights decades of Black art and resistance

euronews (in English)

A new landmark exhibition at the Pompidou Centre is exploring the influence of Black artists in Paris from the 1950s to 2000, showcasing over 300 extraordinary works.

Transcript

00:00Paris Noir is a very ambitious group show showcasing 150 artists across the Caribbean,

00:20Africa and the U.S. and it really follows this incredible epic of decolonization in

00:25Paris and shows and unpacks Paris as a lab for Pan-Africanism, an anti-colonial workshop

00:36also, so you will see 50 years of that decolonizing story in Paris and you will see all these

00:43artists and how they contributed at rewriting the history of modernism and post-modernism,

00:50how these artists reframed abstraction, surrealism and at the same time you will see all the

00:56black solidarities that happened at the time and how these artists really created a Pan-African

01:01art history across black worlds, across the black Atlantic, from Africa to the Americas.

01:09Some are African-Americans, some are Caribbeans, some are Africans, some are Afro-descendants.

01:15The point is to reunite them around this idea of a black Paris.

01:23The focus is not the geography or decentralization, it's not about the race, it's more something

01:31about a black consciousness, a shared experience based on the experience of slavery and based

01:38on the experience of racism that is shared by most of the artists of the exhibition.

01:45It's the beginning, it's a baby step for many French institutions, many French museums

02:04and French universities to start working on these artists, start collecting them, writing

02:09about them, preserving their works in their archives and hopefully dedicating a lot of

02:14their solo shows to many of these artists.

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