Josèfa Ntjam

Episode 10Josèfa Ntjam
Series

Fractured self

Imagine yourself as a mosaic - each shard a memory, each fragment a story. Identity is fragmented, nonlinear, imperfect. Through collage, artists reassemble past and present into visual diaries, embracing the messiness of memory to reveal a self that is ever-evolving, resilient, and beautifully incomplete.

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Episode 10 of 14

Josèfa Ntjam

Josèfa Ntjam creates speculative, multidimensional worlds that reimagine memory as fluid, dynamic, and open to reinvention. Born in Metz in 1992, she blends sculpture, film, photomontage, and sound to construct new narratives of identity, rooted in African history, mythology, and science fiction.

 

Her work challenges fixed ideas of race and origin, drawing on themes of colonialism, displacement, and liberation. In pieces like Mélas de Saturne, she transforms melancholia into a generative force, fusing oceanic imagery with digital landscapes. Ntjam’s installations dissolve boundaries, proposing identities that are porous, collective, and evolving—inviting us to dream futures beyond the constraints of inherited histories.

Episode

Explore the artist's work, stories, and experiences tied to this episode's theme.

"Science fiction lets me create in-between worlds with hybrid and mythological landscapes."

- Josefa Ntjam

Octomeutes
Singap
Josèfa NtjamSingap, 2023
90 x 60cm
Vodun
Josèfa NtjamVodun, 2023
90 x 60cm

Exhibition: Holy Water..., 2023

Holy Water: Discussion with Mami Wata, 2023, Performance at Lafayette Anticipations,

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The Deep & Memories (Maquisards), 2023

In this circular UV print on plexiglass, Joséfa Ntjam conjures a swirling cosmos of fractured histories and layered identities. Figures and textures seem to dissolve into one another, evoking the fading yet resilient traces of colonial resistance. The circular form recalls cycles—of memory, of erasure, and of reclamation—immersing us in an orbit where personal and collective histories intertwine.

The Deep & Memories (Melting...), 2023

This floating, cloud-like form brims with poetic energy. Words and images shimmer on its surface, embodying the ephemeral nature of memory—fluid, malleable, and constantly shifting. Ntjam’s luminous layering encourages us to reflect on how identities are shaped and reshaped through time, carried like whispers across generations.

"There are mythologies that recur often in my work—mythological figures tied to revolutionary spaces. The first is Marthe Ekemeyong Mouto, who fought for Cameroun's independence in 1960. Another is Mami Wata, who comes to life and takes form through a totem.”

 

- Josefa Ntjam

Nummo
Josèfa NtjamNummo, 2021
15 x 60 x 40cm
Aquatic Saffron
Mami Wata on Screen

"Too often have we been the subjects of experimentation, and so we have decided to create our own landscapes, to unsettle visions that were used to naming ‘otherness’ without ever letting it express itself. We have decided the naming through abstraction. A fraying of cantankerous words, too often digested in times past. Polyphemus was not mistaken: we are persona.”

 

 

- Josefa Ntjam

Exhibition: 60th Venice Biennale.

Installation view: Josefa Ntjam, swell of spæc(i)es, 2024. An official collateral event of the 60th Venice Biennale.

Ectocarpus #2

"What does it mean to be inside a film? Or even to feel a performance? For me, it’s almost like being in a giant video game, where you can navigate and encounter characters, details, and landscapes.”

- Josefa Ntjam

Featured Artist

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Josèfa Ntjam
Artist
Josèfa Ntjam
B.1992, French

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film and sound. Collecting the raw material of her work from the internet, books on natural sciences and photographic archives, Ntjam uses assemblage – of images, words, sounds, and stories – as a method to deconstruct the grand narratives underlying hegemonic discourses on origin, identity and race. Her work weaves multiple narratives drawn from investigations into historical events, scientific functions and philosophical concepts, to which she confronts references to African mythology, ancestral rituals, religious symbolism and science-fiction. These apparently heterogeneous discourses and iconographies are marshalled together in an effort to re- appropriate History while speculating on not-yet-determined space-times – interstitial worlds where systems of perception and naming of fixed (id)entities no longer operate. From there, Ntjam composes utopian cartographies and ontological fictions in which technological fantasy, intergalactic voyages and hypothetical underwater civilizations become the matrix for a practice of emancipation that promotes the emergence of inclusive, processual and resilient communities. ...

More Works By: Josèfa Ntjam

Djouka
Josèfa NtjamDjouka, 2023
90 x 60cm
Huew P Newton
Céremonie #1
Josèfa NtjamCéremonie #1, 2024
180 x 120 x 2cm
Nummo
Josèfa NtjamNummo, 2021
15 x 60 x 40cm
Ectocarpus #1
astralizing names
Josèfa Ntjamastralizing names, 2023
110 x 115 x 0.6cm
Shapes of Mami Wata
Lascards
Josèfa NtjamLascards, 2024
40 x 30 x 4cm
Bell Hooks #1
Josèfa NtjamBell Hooks #1, 2024
120 x 90 x 2cm
Bell Hooks #2
Josèfa NtjamBell Hooks #2, 2024
120 x 90 x 2cm
NOMMO VILLAGE
Fish Tank
Josèfa NtjamFish Tank, 2024
110 x 146 x 2cm
Céremonie #2
Josèfa NtjamCéremonie #2, 2024
180 x 120 x 2cm
MAMI
Josèfa NtjamMAMI, 2023
30 x 24 x 4cm
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Bàrbara Moura
Series: Fractured selfEpisode 11
Bàrbara Moura

Channeling the sacred and the sensual through ritual and repetition, Barbara Moura’s work reclaims the body as a site of memory, intuition, and ancestral knowing.

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