PARIS.- Over the past few years, Nuits Balnéaires has established a practice that is hybrid in many ways. The Ivorian artist moves between fine art, fashion, and research-based practices; his influences are a blend of cinema, literature, theater, performance, and cultural history; his life is both rooted in the small coastal town of Grand-Bassam, east of Abidjan, and involved with many more international cultural communities.

Eboro was created as part of the Latitudes program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, of which Nuits Balnéaires is the second laureate. This project introduces a more autobiographical dimension to Nuits Balnéaires’ work. The project begins in Dakar, Senegal, where, on July 22, 1986, his uncle, Noël X. Ebony, a distinguished journalist and playwright, died in unresolved circumstances. “There is an inexplicable connection between us, perhaps stemming from transgenerational memory”, Nuits Balnéaires has said. In the Agni-Bona tradition of Côte d’Ivoire, which has profoundly shaped the artist, the nephew plays a key role in accompanying the uncle during his transition into the afterlife. For the artist, this took the form of an exploration of how prior trajectories, whether distant or familial, may influence or even predetermine our own life paths.

Nuits Balnéaires created Eboro by intuition, allowing the affective power of place and familial memory to shape the interconnected visual chapters of this multilayered work. He welcomes the melancholy and trauma of his uncle’s story with gentleness and hope, probing how imagination can contribute to healing transgenerational wounds.





Multidisciplinary artist and poet Nuits Balnéaires was born and raised in Abidjan, into a family with Akan Agni-Bona and Malinké origins. With intimate connections to both peoples’ traditions, culture and spirituality, his work creates a parallel space-time beyond the constraints of geography, while embracing the universality of oceans as the connective tissue between worlds.

Nuits Balnéaires cultivates powerful ties with the energy of the Gulf of Guinea and its landscapes, hence the omnipresence of water in his photographic practice, films and poetry. Haunted by the duality of life and death, and the possibility of communication between these states, his works convey a euphoric sense of tranquillity that feels both classical and contemporary.

In 2019, Nuits Balnéaires settled in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, to develop his artistic practice, drawing on his years as a fashion and conceptual photographer. He secured a one-year bursary in visual journalism with the World Press Photo Foundation, and was among the winners of a 2020 call for projects from the Goethe-Institut and the Prince Claus Fund, which supports cultural and artistic responses to environmental change. Nuits Balnéaires’s work has been exhibited at Art X Lagos, Paris’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, FNB Art Johannesburg, and in numerous exhibitions across Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Australia.

Curator of the exhibition: David Campany