Radio Papesse

Josèfa Ntjam is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, performance, film and writing. Sourcing her primary materials from the internet and books on Natural Sciences, Ntjam uses collage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives structuring hegemonic discourses on authenticity, origin, identity and race.

Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions or philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals and science-fiction stories. The conflation of a priori heterogeneous discourses and iconographies enables the artist to reclaim History while speculating on not-yet-determined space-times – interstitial, ‘futurible’ worlds where unprecedented forms of beings, identities and collectives can be envisioned.

Her work and performances have been shown in international exhibitions, including Anticorps, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2020); Paysage alentour, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); Risquons-tout, WIELS, Brussels (2020); Climate Knowledges, MAMA, Rotterdam (2020); 15th Biennale de Lyon, MAC Lyon, Lyon (2019); Feminism, Gender, Resistance – Act 3, Arnolfini, Bristol (2019); and Allegoria, duo Show with Kaeto Sweeney, Hordaland Art Center, Bergen, Norway (2019). Ntjam is a member of Paris-based art & research collective Black(s) to the Future.

From there, Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities.