Echo Delay Reverb

Artists: Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Char Jeré, Cici Wu, and more
Curator: Naomi Beckwith

The curator responds to an invitation from the Palais de Tokyo with an ambitious project spanning both floors of the art centre. “Echo Delay Reverb: American Art and Francophone Thought” explores how generations of US-based artists, from the 1970s to today, engage with the theoretical, political and poetic ideas of French and Francophone thinkers.

Bringing together a wide range of media, the exhibition traces transatlantic intellectual exchanges through the work of 60 artists, including several new commissions. It reveals how American artists draw on the revolutionary thought of figures such as Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Lacan, Monique Wittig, Pierre Bourdieu and Édouard Glissant to challenge genres and shift perspectives.

These thinkers—activists, poets, and theorists—provide tools that artists use to critique institutions, question norms, and imagine new ways of seeing and acting. For them, theory is not an afterthought but a catalyst for disrupting social, aesthetic and linguistic conventions.

“Echo Delay Reverb” offers a speculative cartography of these often-overlooked dialogues. Works range from direct engagements with theory to subversive homages and subtle resonances. Artists such as Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon appear alongside emerging voices including Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Char Jeré and Cici Wu. An integrated archival display highlights the individuals, institutions and publishers that have played key roles in bringing Francophone thought to the United States.