Josèfa Ntjam
Josèfa Ntjam's work can be defined as a "multidisciplinary speculative writing" (Barbara Sirieix).
Multidisciplinary because it mixes video, installation, performance, narration, music, sculpture. Speculative because the artist imagines, work after work, possible futures in which the Western definitions of time, nature, plant and animal species, as well as identities are abandoned, exceeded. "I am many" says the artist's voice in the video Mélas de Saturne (2020), like a credo that opposes the operations consisting in classifying or naming a form of emancipating poetic freedom.
Nourished by very different influences that range from Afro-futurism to feminist writings, from science fiction to web cultures, from African myths to Detroit techno, this cyborg work functions at first as a montage. But the heterogeneity of the sources is as if absorbed into the visual and sound universe of the artist, immediately recognizable by its forms, its colors, its voice or the hypnotic and critical experiences it proposes.
— Jill Gasparina
Entrusted since 2021 to the critic and curator Jill Gasparina, the "Entretiens sur l'art" which, for more than 20 years, have been drawing a formidable collection of artists' words, will from now on carefully scrutinize the materiality and the conditions of emergence of the invited artists' works. "How does one become an artist? What is a creative process? How does a work develop over time? How is it nourished by external influences? But also: where do artists work? In what financial and family economy do they work? What networks of collaboration do they set up? How does the routine of the artistic activity share with the more expressive and creative dimension of their work?"
Josèfa Ntjam was born in Metz (1992). She lives and works in Saint-Etienne.
