Venus Noire

Seyni Awa Camara, Khadija Jayi, Alexandra Karakashian, Laetitia Ky, Aida Muluneh 

curated by Alessandro Romanini

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opening Thursday, November 27th, 2025

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on view until February 14th, 2025

Galleria Anna Marra is pleased to present Venus Noire, a group exhibition curated by Alessandro Romanini, which brings together a group of artists from Africa and its diaspora. The exhibition aims to map out the most current expressive strategies that synergistically unite ethics and aesthetics, human rights, and metalinguistic reflections on the role of art.​

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The conceptual core of the exhibition is the iconic figure of Josephine Baker (1906 – 1975), marking the 50th anniversary of her death and the 100th anniversary of her legendary "debut" on the Parisian stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with the "Revue Nègre" (1925), an event that marked the "Jazz Age" and the growing interest in African culture in Europe.
The exhibition intends to celebrate Baker not only as a performer and style icon who brilliantly manipulated Eurocentric stereotypes about Black culture (from the famous "danse sauvage" with the banana skirt to her influence on fashion design, reaching Christian Dior and Beyoncé), but also and above all for her inexhaustible attitude as an activist. The experience of Josephine Baker and the artists involved illustrates how the body becomes a place of power, an instrument for composing dialectics, and a terrain of conflict, as well as a tool for strategies of reflection on the female and racial universe.

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The artists in the exhibition, through a wide range of languages spanning from photography to performance, from painting to installation, align themselves with Baker’s subtle and articulated strategy: undermining the rigid structures of Eurocentric and Western storytelling from within and giving shape to new models of (self-)representation.
The exhibition itinerary explores fundamental themes, such as Identity and Self-Representation, Ethics, and Aesthetics. The works emphasize the importance of the "locus of enunciation," highlighting the speaker’s point of view and overcoming the risks associated with intersectional discrimination (race and gender), creating a perfect harmony between claims related to human rights/gender and reflections on the role of art, in line with the concept of Post-Blackness developed by figures like Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon. The artworks demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of contemporary phenomena and an ability to elaborate new expressive strategies suitable for complex historical junctures, moving beyond the militant aggressiveness of the 1960s in favor of subtle critical reflection.
 

To complete the tribute and contextualize her influence, the installation will include a selection of precious archival images and films on the life and art of the "Black Venus," offering a direct look at the danse sauvage, the famous stage costumes, and Baker's role as a style icon and activist, creating a continuous dialogue between the performer's revolutionary past and the expressive strategies of the contemporary artists.

 

Venus Noire offers the public the opportunity to immerse themselves in an itinerary that is both a historical tribute and a contemporary affirmation. It is an invitation to reflect on the power of the body and the word in art, in a continuous dialogue between past and present rooted in Josephine Baker’s revolutionary strategies.

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ITA

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