In October 2025, curator Naomi Beckwith responds to an invitation from the Palais de Tokyo with an ambitious project that will unfold across the two floors of the art centre’s exhibition spaces. ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art and Francophone Thought will explore how successive generations of artists in the United States from the 1970s onwards have appropriated theoretical, political and poetic concepts developed by French and Francophone writers and thinkers.

Bringing together a wide range of forms and mediums, ECHO DELAY REVERB proposes to explore the history of transatlantic intellectual circulations through the work of sixty artists, including a number of new commissions. The exhibition will show how artists in the United States catalyzed the revolutionary energies of thinkers who were by turn activists and poets – from Simon de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida to Frantz Fanon, Jean Genet, Aimé Césaire, Monique Wittig, Pierre Bourdieu and Edouard Glissant – to transgress genres and shift perspectives on the world today. Reading the work of these authors helped artists in the United States to translate their ideas into unexpected forms and to forge tools with which critique institutions of the art world and of society as a whole. For them, theory has not been a gloss but a powerful impetus for denaturalizing social, aesthetic and linguistic norms and opening up new ways of seeing and acting upon the world.

ECHO DELAY REVERB looks to offer a speculative cartography of these important yet little-known exchanges by bringing together works by several generations of artists from the 1970s through to the present day. Some attest to direct dialogues between theory and practice, while others feature subversive acts of homage or explore more allusive correspondences. Works by artists including Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lorna Simpson, and Glenn Ligon will be presented alongside those of emerging artists including Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Char Jeré, and Cici Wu. An archival display woven into the exhibition will highlight some of the many individuals, institutions and publishers who have been crucial in disseminating ideas from the Francophone world throughout the United States.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book edited by Elvan Zabunyan, professor in contemporary art history at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and published by Editions B42. Through essays by Adam Shatz and Aria Dean and interviews with Judith Butler, Huey Copeland and Renée Green, this publication will explore the various exchanges that have given rise to the circulation of ideas from the Francophone world to the United States and back again. A number of short texts by contemporary American and French-speaking theorists offer additional contemporary perspectives on these circulations.