Nanténé Traoré: Pays des merveilles

The MEP presents “pays des merveilles”, the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to Nanténé Traoré. The exhibition brings together a new analogue photographic project made in Brittany in summer 2025 and a film produced during a residency in Albania in summer 2026. Together, the works explore memory, attachment, disappearance and the shifting relationship between inner and external landscapes.

Traoré’s photographs originate in a return to the Breton coast, a place visited by the artist as a child with his mother. The experience brings traumatic memories to the surface and informs a series of images made with expired film stock dating from the 1990s. Chemical alterations in the film affect colour and definition, producing blurred contours and unstable, almost ghostly scenes. During walks along the coast, Traoré turns his attention to shorelines, birds, stray dogs and sleeping figures, recording places and beings through a gaze shaped by memory.

Hazy blue and orange tones further dissolve the boundaries between bodies and landscapes, allowing the external environment to reflect shifting inner states. The accompanying film develops this sense of dissolution through a fixed view of a landscape and the artist’s inner voice, creating a meditation on perception and recollection.