A world resurfaces, fragment by fragment, in the slow rhythm of reassembling forms. For her largest exhibition to date, Josèfa Ntjam transforms the 1,200 square meters of the Institute of contemporary art and the display windows of the Gare Part-Dieu metro station into a sensory, political, and mythological drift. A territory where everything wavers: textures, voices, memories. Here, form follows the fracture, and legend echoes the pulse of an underground heart.
The title, INTRICATIONS [ENTANGLEMENTS], comes from quantum physics. It speaks to this: that two particles, even separated by light- years, can continue to resonate together. It is this bond— woven between things that seemed worlds apart, skin and metal, revolt and plant life, a scream and a comet—that flows through the entire journey of the exhibition.
The title, INTRICATIONS [ENTANGLEMENTS], comes from quantum physics. It speaks to this: that two particles, even separated by light- years, can continue to resonate together. It is this bond— woven between things that seemed worlds apart, skin and metal, revolt and plant life, a scream and a comet—that flows through the entire journey of the exhibition.
One enters as if stepping into a forest of images—a threshold of matter, dense, almost impenetrable. Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié, Élisabeth Djouka, Mafory Bangoura1 stand watch here, guardians of the stories about to be told. In their wake appears Persona, a shifting entity, embodied yet unbound, traversed by voices, bodies, and data. She never speaks from a singular “I,” but from a network: one of Black memory, matriarchal lineages, queer identities, and buried histories. Her voice is diffracted, doubled, as if to signal that any act of speaking from the margins is always layered. In her passage, she carves the bed of historical narrative, letting myths, inheritances, and possibilities flow through.
Spiritualities tied to the elements, Dogon2, Fang3, and Bassa4 cosmogonies, stories born in exile... these do not merely add up: they respond to and rub against each other, generating new images, beings on the run. For what is at stake here is a mythology of flight—not as abandonment, but as strategy, as the science
of escape and displacement. This weaving calls for another map, another ground: that of the living, not as backdrop, but as ally. The figures Josèfa Ntjam invokes—mycelium, hydras, corals—are not ornaments. They are language. They embody a quiet strength: the power to build in the shadows, endlessly regenerating. Here, the living is resistance. It connects and infiltrates; it sustains.
INTRICATIONS unfolds like an expanding fiction. To compose it, Josèfa Ntjam draws on everything: cardboard and bio-resin, video game engines and artificial intelligence, sand, metal, and song. She experiments. She blends. She assembles as one invents worlds. Technologies become organs, materials turn into messengers, and installations become bodies in transformation.
All around, the cosmos resonates. It is not a backdrop, but an open-air archive—a space to house the voices cast out of history’s frame. At its core: a sound installation, the artist’s first of its kind, conceived specifically for the IAC. A sensitive center of gravity, it acts as a beating heart, a chamber of echoes that absorbs and redistributes the vibrations of the exhibition.
In INTRICATIONS, fiction is alive. It does not illuminate; it whispers, twists, and pulls us along. And perhaps, with it, our gaze too begins to recompose itself. Josèfa Ntjam stands in the lineage of those who think with fiction—not to flee the real, but to reveal its hidden folds. With Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Drexciya, or Kodwo Eshun5, she dreams—yes—but dreams with teeth, with roots, with the sea.
GARE PART-DIEU METRO STATION
At the Gare Part-Dieu metro station, three display windows host an extension of the INTRICATIONS exhibition, becoming fragments of a larger narrative—outposts of an expanding imaginary.
The first two windows, echoing the opening gallery of the Institut d’art contemporain, take the form of dioramas. Once again, biological entities, mythological figures, and contemporary elements compose a floating topography that resonates with the layered logic central to Josèfa Ntjam’s practice. These windows do not signal—they drift. They turn waiting into listening, and the commuter into a fleeting witness.
The third window gathers the posters of the four video works projected at the Institut d’art contemporain—Dislocations, Myceaqua Vitae, matter gone wild, swell of spæc(i)es. Created in collaboration with Sean Hart, they are conceived as fragments of worlds, portals into decentered temporalities. Here too, each image is designed as a sensitive organ of the project—a surface to pass through rather than a mere visual.
Thus, even in the heart of everyday transit, INTRICATIONS continues to resonate. It seeps into the ordinary, slips between connections, and invites a more porous kind of attention. Because here too, between tiles and metal, something is breathing.
Spiritualities tied to the elements, Dogon2, Fang3, and Bassa4 cosmogonies, stories born in exile... these do not merely add up: they respond to and rub against each other, generating new images, beings on the run. For what is at stake here is a mythology of flight—not as abandonment, but as strategy, as the science
of escape and displacement. This weaving calls for another map, another ground: that of the living, not as backdrop, but as ally. The figures Josèfa Ntjam invokes—mycelium, hydras, corals—are not ornaments. They are language. They embody a quiet strength: the power to build in the shadows, endlessly regenerating. Here, the living is resistance. It connects and infiltrates; it sustains.
INTRICATIONS unfolds like an expanding fiction. To compose it, Josèfa Ntjam draws on everything: cardboard and bio-resin, video game engines and artificial intelligence, sand, metal, and song. She experiments. She blends. She assembles as one invents worlds. Technologies become organs, materials turn into messengers, and installations become bodies in transformation.
All around, the cosmos resonates. It is not a backdrop, but an open-air archive—a space to house the voices cast out of history’s frame. At its core: a sound installation, the artist’s first of its kind, conceived specifically for the IAC. A sensitive center of gravity, it acts as a beating heart, a chamber of echoes that absorbs and redistributes the vibrations of the exhibition.
In INTRICATIONS, fiction is alive. It does not illuminate; it whispers, twists, and pulls us along. And perhaps, with it, our gaze too begins to recompose itself. Josèfa Ntjam stands in the lineage of those who think with fiction—not to flee the real, but to reveal its hidden folds. With Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Drexciya, or Kodwo Eshun5, she dreams—yes—but dreams with teeth, with roots, with the sea.
GARE PART-DIEU METRO STATION
From September 13, 2025 to January 11, 2026
At the Gare Part-Dieu metro station, three display windows host an extension of the INTRICATIONS exhibition, becoming fragments of a larger narrative—outposts of an expanding imaginary.
The first two windows, echoing the opening gallery of the Institut d’art contemporain, take the form of dioramas. Once again, biological entities, mythological figures, and contemporary elements compose a floating topography that resonates with the layered logic central to Josèfa Ntjam’s practice. These windows do not signal—they drift. They turn waiting into listening, and the commuter into a fleeting witness.
The third window gathers the posters of the four video works projected at the Institut d’art contemporain—Dislocations, Myceaqua Vitae, matter gone wild, swell of spæc(i)es. Created in collaboration with Sean Hart, they are conceived as fragments of worlds, portals into decentered temporalities. Here too, each image is designed as a sensitive organ of the project—a surface to pass through rather than a mere visual.
Thus, even in the heart of everyday transit, INTRICATIONS continues to resonate. It seeps into the ordinary, slips between connections, and invites a more porous kind of attention. Because here too, between tiles and metal, something is breathing.
1. Marthe Ekemeyong Moumié, a Cameroonian independence activist, writer, and political prisoner, dedicated her life to the anti-colonial struggle. Élisabeth Djouka, a healer and traditional Bassa chief, was arrested for her role in resistance movements; she embodied both ancestral knowledge and political voice. Mafory Bangoura, a key figure in Guinea’s fight for independence, worked toward the emancipation of women and their organization in the public sphere. All three are anchoring figures—powers of care, revolt, and transmission.
2. The Dogon people, settled along the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali, uphold a complex cosmogony intertwining origin stories, aquatic figures such as the Nommo, and symbolic knowledge passed down orally. Their cyclical worldview unites spirituality, speech, and matter.
3. The Fang, a Bantu people from Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and southern Cameroon, transmit through the Mvett an initiatory narrative that weaves together philosophy, history, and spirituality, linking the living, ancestors, and invisible forces through struggle and transformation.
4. The Bassa, mainly located in Cameroon, ground their oral tradition in song, poetry, and initiatory tales, including the Mvett, which recounts ancestral memory, migrations, and spiritual knowledge. Their cosmology resonates through a constant dialogue between visible and invisible worlds, carried by voice, breath, and rhythm.
5. Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Drexciya, and Kodwo Eshun are major figures of Afrofuturism. Musician Sun Ra developed a sonic cosmology blending jazz and science fiction to imagine emancipated Black futures. Writer Octavia Butler explored transformation, marginal identities, and transmission in her narratives. The techno duo Drexciya created an aquatic mythology born from the transatlantic slave trade. Theorist Kodwo Eshun conceives fiction as a critical and speculative tool for reconfiguring diasporic narratives.
2. The Dogon people, settled along the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali, uphold a complex cosmogony intertwining origin stories, aquatic figures such as the Nommo, and symbolic knowledge passed down orally. Their cyclical worldview unites spirituality, speech, and matter.
3. The Fang, a Bantu people from Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and southern Cameroon, transmit through the Mvett an initiatory narrative that weaves together philosophy, history, and spirituality, linking the living, ancestors, and invisible forces through struggle and transformation.
4. The Bassa, mainly located in Cameroon, ground their oral tradition in song, poetry, and initiatory tales, including the Mvett, which recounts ancestral memory, migrations, and spiritual knowledge. Their cosmology resonates through a constant dialogue between visible and invisible worlds, carried by voice, breath, and rhythm.
5. Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, Drexciya, and Kodwo Eshun are major figures of Afrofuturism. Musician Sun Ra developed a sonic cosmology blending jazz and science fiction to imagine emancipated Black futures. Writer Octavia Butler explored transformation, marginal identities, and transmission in her narratives. The techno duo Drexciya created an aquatic mythology born from the transatlantic slave trade. Theorist Kodwo Eshun conceives fiction as a critical and speculative tool for reconfiguring diasporic narratives.
