Valérie John: I telman nwè ki i blé (So Black It Turns Blue)

The exhibition presents a selection of Valérie John’s work dating from the 1990s to the present, tracing an artistic practice shaped by her return to Martinique and her sustained engagement with the island’s translocal memory. Working across paper and textile assemblages, installations, clothing, objects and books, the artist explores indigo as both a material and a vehicle for memory and identity. The works connect Martinique with West Africa, bringing together fragments of histories, identities and lived experience. Indigo becomes a recurring presence, explored through its changing shades and transformations, from deep blues to intense blacks. The exhibition offers an immersive sensory experience in which colour, material and gesture intersect. Across the selection, individual elements operate as traces of the past while contributing to an ongoing process of identity construction rooted in place, movement and cultural memory.