Josèfa Ntjam

Josèfa Ntjam was born in 1992 in Metz, France, to a family of Cameroonian origin, and is based in Saint-Étienne, France. Her practice — encompassing video, photography, sculpture, installation, and performance — engages with Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and the philosophy of science to produce work that reimagines African history and cosmology from within a radically open and generative temporal framework. Drawing on marine biology, mycology, quantum physics, and Cameroonian spiritual traditions, she constructs immersive worlds in which the boundaries between the organic and the synthetic, the ancestral and the futuristic, are deliberately dissolved.

Ntjam's work is informed by the theorists of the Black Atlantic and Afrofuturism — Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, Kodwo Eshun, Édouard Glissant — and by science fiction from Samuel R. Delany to Octavia Butler. Her images and videos feature bodily transformation, symbiotic relationships between human and non-human organisms, and narratives of escape from or transcendence of the colonial historical record. The sea is a recurring site and symbol in her work: both the traumatic space of the Middle Passage and a source of alternative life-forms, fluid identities, and forms of memory that exceed what Western historiography can accommodate.

Ntjam has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Consortium Museum in Dijon, and the Photographers' Gallery in London. She was awarded the inaugural Comité Professionnel des Galeries d'Art and Fluxus Prize at Frieze London. She has participated in group exhibitions addressing Afrofuturism, speculative practices, and decolonial aesthetics at institutions across Europe and North America. She is represented by Nicoletti Contemporary in London.