Art Basel Paris

Art Basel Paris

Abbas Zahedi, Josèfa Ntjam

Shared booth with seventeen, London

24.10.25 - 26.10.25



Click here to access the list of works

 

NıCOLETTı is delighted to present a joint stand in the Galeries section of Art Basel Paris 2025, with new  works by Abbas Zahedi and Josèfa Ntjam (presented by NıCOLETTı); accompanied by Patrick Goddard  and Justin Fitzpatrick (presented by Seventeen, London). 

 

Exploring the interconnectedness of natural and historical mechanisms, this exhibition unites four artists  who share a common interest in analysing the processes of exchange between human consciousness,  environmental structures, and socio-political systems. The works, each conceived to respond to one  another, implement ideas of flux, contamination, and mutation to address political questions related to  ecology, class, and identity.  

 

Inspired by Afrofuturism and science fiction, Josèfa Ntjam’s practice combines sculpture,  photomontage, film, and sound, through which the artist revisits colonial and Afrodiasporic history  through the lens of natural sciences. Following her inclusion in the official programme of collateral  events at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024), the Gwangju Biennale (2024-25), and coinciding with her  participation in the 36th São Paulo Biennial (2025-26) and the MOMENTA Biennial of Contemporary  Art, Montreal (2025-26), Ntjam’s presentation at Art Basel Paris marks a major development in her practice, expanding her technique of image-making to produce an altarpiece comprising  photomontages printed on aluminium and inserted into a moving wooden structure.  

 

Titled The Undercommons, the work is inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1500), which Ntjam reinterprets to conjure an opulent universe in which, collapsing the micro and the macro, portraits of figures involved in independence movements and representations of African deities merge with an array of mythological animals, plants, and molecules. Through this technique,  the artist establishes parallels between the modes of survival employed by natural organisms and the  systems of beliefs and resistance used by sidelined groups of people to infiltrate dominant political  bodies across history.  

 

Similar ideas are explored by Abbas Zahedi, whose practice spans sculpture, installation, and performance. Rooted in the emotional textures of urban life, his work blends scientific and conceptual research with sensory installations that encourage reflections on the interconnectedness of ecological, cultural, and human systems.  

 

At Art Basel Paris, Zahedi presents sonic sculptures inspired by his solo exhibition Begin Again at  Tate Modern, London (2025-26), where the artist presents works that combine industrial pipes and musical instruments generating sound from recordings of Tate’s plumbing and electrical systems. In Paris, Zahedi expands on this research by presenting Nicoletti Bells (2025), a sculptural installation including eight tuned bells made from nitrous oxide (NOS) canisters – objects formerly associated  with recreational euphoria, now reclassified as controlled substances under the UK’s Psychoactive  Substances Act. Increasingly difficult to obtain through licit means, these canisters have been  repurposed into musical instruments, each one tuned to play different sounds and notes.  

 

The sculpture is accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Zahedi performing the bells while in  an unspecified altered state, invoking a practice grounded in somatic intuition and trauma-informed  navigation. This performance was recorded and embedded into a vibrational transducer connected to a heating radiator drawn from NıCOLETTı’s gallery space. Rather than employing conventional  amplification, the audio circulates via a thermal infrastructure, activating pipes and metal surfaces  to distribute low-frequency resonance across the architectural field of the booth. The sound is not  localised, but diffused – present in the walls, the floor, the body.  

 

The sculptural and sonic components are indivisible. The tuned canisters emit a register that oscillates  between ritual and rupture, formal precision and fugitive trace. Rooted in Zahedi’s wider practice, the  installation refuses the transparency of representation. Instead, it engages opacity, delay, and spatial  displacement as modes of survival and relation. The NOS bells articulate a form of chronopolitics in  which time is neither linear nor recoverable, but marked by repetition, movement, and reactivation. Their resonance constitutes a sonic enactment of survivance – an ongoing negotiation of complex trauma  that neither resolves nor recedes, but reverberates.

 

Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz, France, and currently lives and works in Saint-Étienne, France. She studied in Amiens, France,  Dakar, Senegal (Cheikh Anta Diop University) and graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Bourges, France (2015), and the  École Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Paris-Cergy, France (2017). 

 

In 2025, Ntjam is participating in the 36th São Paulo Art Biennial, Brazil (06.09.25 – 11.01.26), as well as MOMENTA Biennial of  contemporary art, Montreal, Canada (10.09 – 01.11.25). Her largest exhibition to date, INTRICATIONS, will also be on view at The Institut  d’art contemporain – IAC Villeurbanne, FR (03.10.25 – 11.01.26). 

 

Solo exhibitions include swell of spæc(i)es, official collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, commissioned by LAS Foundation, Berlin, Accademia di Belli Arti di Venezia and Palazzina Canonica, Venice, IT (2024); Une  cosmogonies des océans, LVMH Métiers d’Art, Paris, FR (2024); Futuristic Ancestry, Fotografiska, New York, USA; Berlin, DE; and  Stockholm, SE (2024–25); matter gone wild, Fondation Pernod-Ricard, Paris, FR (2023–24); Limestone Memories – un maquis sous  les étoiles, NıCOLETTı, London (2023); Underground Resistance – Living Memories, The Photographers’ Gallery, London, UK (2022); When the Moon Dreamed of the Ocean, FACT, Liverpool, UK (2022); and we’ll kill them with love, CAC La Traverse, Alfortville, FR (2022);  Molecular Genealogies, NıCOLETTı, London, UK (2021); and Allegoria, duo show with Kaeto Sweeney, Hordaland Art Center, Bergen, NO (2019). 

 

Ntjam’s work and performances have been shown in international museums and exhibitions, including Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK;  TBA21, Madrid, ES; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, FR; Lafayette Anticipations,  Paris, FR; LUMA, Arles, FR; Centre Pompidou, Metz, FR; MAMC+ – Musée d’art moderne et contemporain de Saint-Etienne, FR;  Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, USA; Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, PT; Radius CCA, Delft, NL; Mucem, Marseille,  FR; Africamuseum, Tervuren, BE; MuCAT – Musée des Cultures Contemporaines Adama Toungara, Abidjan, IC; WIELS, Brussels, BE;  MAMA, Rotterdam, NE; and the 15th Biennale de Lyon, MAC Lyon, Lyon, FR. 

 

Ntjam’s work is part of the permanent collections of LVMH, Paris, FR; TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection),  Madrid, ES; Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL), Marrakech, MA; MAMC+ – Musée d’art moderne et  contemporain de Saint-Etienne, FR; Institut d’Art Contemporain – IAC, Villeurbanne, FR; Fondation H, Montanarivo, MG; Centre national  des arts plastiques (Cnap), Paris, FR; Fonds d’art contemporain – Paris Collections, FR; Fondation Villa Datris, L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, FR;  FRAC Ile-de-France, Paris, FR; FRAC MECA Nouvelle-Aquitaine, Bordeaux, FR; FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, FR; FRAC Alsace,  Sélestat, FR; EIB Institute, Luxemburg; and Artothèque de Strasbourg, FR. 

 

Abbas Zahedi (b. 1984, London, UK) blends contemporary philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics with performative  and new-media modes. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Zahedi makes  connections whenever possible with people involved in the particular situations upon which he focuses. His sculptures,  installations and performances engage with systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the creation of communal  spaces for dialogue. Often uniting personal narratives and broader collective concerns, Zahedi uses sound and  materiality as conduits for reflection and connection. 

 

In 2025, Zahedi is the subject of a solo exhibition at Tate Modern, London. In 2022, he won the Frieze Artist Award. Selected solo exhibitions include The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, IR (2026 – forthcoming); Tate Modern (2025–26);  Nottingham Contemporary (2023); Mahler-Lewitt Studios, Spoleto, Italy (2023); CAPC, Bordeaux, France (2022);  Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); and South London Gallery (2020). 

 

Zahedi’s work and performances have been shown in international museums and exhibitions, including CAPC,  Bordeaux, FR (2024–25); Public Gallery, London, UK (2025); Phillida Reid, London, UK (2025); Chisenhale, London,  UK (2024); Woonhuis, Netherlands (2024); Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, USA (2024); KW, Berlin, DE (2023); Bold  Tendencies, London, UK (2023); Gianni Manhattan, Vienna, AT (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2022);  Goldsmiths CCA, London, UK (2022); Studio Voltaire, London, UK (2022); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK (2022);  FUTURA, Prague, CZ (2021); Tate Britain, London, UK (2021) 

Zahedi’s work is part of the permenant collections of The Royal College of Art and Tate. 



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