A large textile artwork featuring a blue patterned background with scattered rectangular patches of blue and orange fabric, some attached with safety pins and clips.

See below

Valérie John, Beau comme l’intérieure d’un temple. Photo credit : JB Barret ©Adagp, Paris, 2026

I TELMAN NWÈ KI I BLÉ (SO BLACK IT TURNS BLUE)

VALÉRIE JOHN

from 10/21/2026 to 02/14/2027

Valérie John proposes to explore indigo blue as a material, a memory and a gesture. From Martinique to West Africa, her œuvre brings together identities and stories in assemblages that constitute sensory traces of the past.

A mixed-media art installation featuring suspended metallic shapes, hanging strips, a patterned floor covering, and bird sculptures flying overhead in a gallery space. — Valérie John, Et si les griots, 2021 ©Adagp, Paris, 2026

Entitled “I telman nwè ki i blé (So Black It Turns Blue)”, this solo exhibition presents a selection of Valérie John’s work dating back to the 1990s and her return to Martinique, where she set up a “workshop-work-of-art”. This choice was a commitment to pursuing her œuvre through an immersion in her milieu, one rooted in the island’s translocal memory and in a shifting
gesture of identity construction.

At the Palais de Tokyo, through paper and textile assemblages, installations, clothing, objects and books, she proposes an immersion in indigo and its metamorphoses: an aesthetic and sensory experience that extends from the deepest blues to the brightest blacks.