PARIS.- Valérie John proposes to explore indigo blue as a material, a memory and a gesture. From Martinique to West Africa, her œuvre brings together identities and stories in assemblages that constitute sensory traces of the past.

Entitled “I telman nwè ki i blé (So Black It Turns Blue)”, this exhibition presents a selection of Valérie John’s work dating back to the 1990s and her return to Martinique, where she set up a “workshop-work-of-art”. This choice was a commitment to pursuing her œuvre through an immersion in her milieu, one rooted in the island’s translocal memory and in a shifting gesture of identity construction.

At the Palais de Tokyo, she proposes an immersion in indigo and its metamorphoses, from the deepest blues to the brightest blacks. She draws on a palette charged with different forms of symbolism linked to water, grief, transatlantic memory, reparation and corporeal alterity. Assemblages in paper and textile, installations, clothing, objects and books unfold over the walls, spread across the floor, and hang suspended in space. This twilight journey, which echoes the island environment of Martinique, extends the research she has been pursuing since the 1980s between France and West Africa into memory and its various strata, through textile objects such as the pagne [wrapper].

Drawing on craft indigo dyeing techniques that she has learned, in particular those used in Senegal, one of the countries she calls home, Valérie John develops an art of the palimpsest that centres on the reuse of materials, writing, and the unveiling of different layers, densities and depths. Starting out from textiles, books, papers and documents that she collects and transforms, she makes a still-unfolding collective history her own, and explains that she looks to become “an anthropologist of [her] self” by “opening up to all the memories yet to be woven”.

Curator: Amandine Nana, assisted by Candice Ratsimba

This exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Center for Art, Research and Alliances (CARA), New York.

Valérie John was born in 1964 in Fort-de-France, and studied art at Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in the early 1980s, before pursuing a master’s degree during which she researched the pagne [wrapper] and its links to memory and identity construction. This led her to renew her relationship with Africa, with Senegal becoming a major site for her creative work. Upon her return to Martinique in the 1990s, she worked as an art teacher whilst pursuing her own practice. Today she teaches art and oversees cultural programmes at the Lycée Victor Anicet, and is a member of Southern Caribbean section of AICA [International Association of Art Critics].

Her work has been exhibited in France, Africa, the United States, Canada, Martinique and the Caribbean. Her recent projects include her solo exhibition “Ecriture(s) Liminaire(s)… On the Threshold of a Translocal Practice” at the Fondation Clément in Martinique in 2021, “Indigo, the Cabinet of Curiosities” as part of the OFF programme of the Dakar Biennale in 2022, as well as group exhibitions such as “Paris noir: circulations artistiques et luttes anticoloniales” at the Centre Pompidou (2025) and “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World” in New York (2012-2013).