JEAN DAVID NKOT AND BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN: Afroblue, Fondation Blachère
Overview
JEAN DAVID NKOT AND BOLUWATIFE OYEDIRAN, Afroblue, Fondation Blachère
In April opened the exhibition Afroblue at Fondation Blachère — an exhibition showcasing 36 artists from Africa and its diaspora who use blue as a language and vehicle for history, memory, and projection — including works by Jean David Nkot and Boluwatife Oyediran.
 
With this body of works, Jean David Nkot mobilizes blue as a critical prism through which to examine the logics of resource extraction—particularly cobalt—and their impacts on bodies and territories. Layered onto this contemporary reading is a cultural dimension drawn from the Bassa community, where blue, worn by women during widowhood, marks a period of purification and protection. Deployed across a multiplicity of shades, it thus becomes a polysemic sign, oscillating between violence and repair, ritual memory and a critique of systems of domination.
 
Part of the « Inverted Blackness » series, this body of work stands as the visual expression of the mutations in identity that take place within those who arrive in the United States, in the face of a culture to which they are strangers. Here, Oyediran visualizes the experience, hybridity, and changing identity of the Black immigrant, using blue—not only as the color of migration—but also as the color of transfiguration.
 
 
 
Fondation Blachère | Afroblue
April 9 — September 19, 2026
121 Chemin de Coucourdon, La Gare de Bonnieux, 84480 Bonnieux.
Works
Installation Views