Intrications
Josèfa Ntjam
Institut d’art contemporain – IAC | Villeurbanne, FR
Institutional
03.10.25 - 22.02.26Solo exhibition at Institut d'art contemporain – IAC
Villeurbanne, FR
Intrications, presented by the Institut d’art contemporain – IAC in Villeurbanne, France, is Josèfa Ntjam’s largest solo exhibition to date. The exhibition is curated by Sarah Caillet.
Intrications (Entanglements) unfolds like an expanding fiction. One enters as into a forest of images, a threshold of matter: dense, nearly impenetrable. Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié, Élisabeth Djouka, and Mafory Bangoura stand watch here, guardians of the stories that are about to be told. In their wake, Persona, Marthe and Saturna — shifting avatars, embodied without being assigned — are crossed by voices, bodies, and data. They never speak from a single “I” but from a network: of Black memory, matriarchal lineages, queer identities, and suppressed histories. Their voices are refracted, doubled, as if to show that all speech from the margins is layered.
Brought together, these figures – real or imagined – intertwine with Dogon, Fang, and Bassa cosmogonies, as well as diasporic myths born of exile. A teeming maquis as much as a fantasized biotope, the exhibition space shelters its own speculative mythology, populated with chimeric figures and biological entities. These later, chosen for their structural or biological capacities, embody a discreet strength: that of building in the shadows while endlessly regenerating themselves. Interlaced, the whole rubs and resonates to produce new images, fugitives in the making. What’s at stake is a poetics of flight — not as abandonment, but as strategy, as the science of escape and displacement. Clandestine, aquatic, shifting, fiction here is resistance.