Mbindi
Josèfa Ntjam
Prix Marcel Duchamp 2026
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris | FR
Institutional
02.10.26 - 07.02.27Josèfa Ntjam is nominated as a finalist for the Marcel Duchamp Prize 2026, for which she presents a solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, organised in collaboration with Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Titled Mbindi, the installation features a new film in which Ntjam stages a dialogue between Joseph (her father) and Soñ (his child) in the form of a tarot reading where the cards point to three places synonymous with resilience: the ocean, the village of Malandè in Cameroon, and the maquis of the resistance fighters. These places and their histories are evoked by Mbindi, a hybrid creature inspired by the techno-mythological myth of Drexciya, born on Detroit in the 1980s. Mbindi carries the collective memory of an imaginary people descended from African women who were thrown overboard from slave ships while pregnant. Their initiatory journey through an ocean of memory — conceived as an animated environment of fragmented archives — aims to pass on a buried collective narrative to their people.
The film explores the role of myth, born of the interplay of memory and forgetting, as a survival mechanism in in the face of trauma. Here, memories metamorphose into living elements of a sensitive ecosystem, sustained by the reparative figure of Mbindi.