Join us at ICP for a conversation between artists Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré with curators David Campany and Clement Cheroux on the occasion of their exhibition, Latitudes: Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré. After the program, join the artists for a signing in the ICP Shop.
This program is being offered both in person at ICP, located on NYC's Lower East Side, and online. Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $5 and include access to ICP’s galleries.
About the Exhibition
Inaugurated in 2024, Latitudes broadens the scope of Immersion, the former French-American photography commission launched in 2014 as a residency between France and the United States. The new program takes its name from a geographical concept, affirming its ambition to shed light on artists from scenes that are still underrepresented on the international stage. Côte d’Ivoire is the first country to be honored in the two-year cycle inaugurated in 2024. Each project will be accompanied by a photobook in English and French editions, co-published by Atelier EXB and the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès.
About the Speakers
Multidisciplinary artist and poet Nuits Balnéaires was born and raised in Abidjan, into a family with Akan Agni-Bona and Malinké origins. With intimate connections to both peoples’ traditions, culture and spirituality, his work creates a parallel space-time beyond the constraints of geography, while embracing the universality of oceans as the connective tissue between worlds. Nuits Balnéaires cultivates powerful ties with the energy of the Gulf of Guinea and its landscapes, hence the omnipresence of water in his photographic practice, films and poetry. Haunted by the duality of life and death, and the possibility of communication between these states, his works convey a euphoric sense of tranquillity that feels both classical and contemporary. In 2019, Nuits Balnéaires settled in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, to develop his artistic practice, drawing on his years as a fashion and conceptual photographer. He secured a one-year bursary in visual journalism with the World Press Photo Foundation, and was among the winners of a 2020 call for projects from the Goethe-Institut and the Prince Claus Fund, which supports cultural and artistic responses to environmental change. Nuits Balnéaires’s work has been exhibited at Art X Lagos, Paris’s 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, FNB Art Johannesburg, and in numerous exhibitions across Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, the US, the UK, France, the Netherlands and Australia.
Born in 1978 in Lille, France. François-Xavier Gbré lives and works between La Rochelle (France) and Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire). Steeped in time and geography, Gbré’s work draws on the language of architecture as a witness to memory and social change. From colonial remains to landscapes redefined by current events, Gbré explores territories and revisits History. The constant dialogue with his environment leads him to use different scales and exhibition methods, whether crafting meticulous installations based on thorough investigations of the land, or using architecture itself to make photography resonate through a physical relationship with the viewer or the public space. His work has been shown in Paris and Abidjan at the Cécile Fakhoury Gallery, which represents him, at the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, the Venice Biennale in Italy, in Madagascar, Nigeria, the United States, and various European countries. His works are included, among others, in the collections of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, USA), Tate Modern (London, UK), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), the Walther Collection (Neu-Ulm, Germany – New York, USA), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (USA), the Collection of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles (France), and the FNAC – Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France). In 2020, François-Xavier Gbré was awarded the Louis Roederer Discovery Award at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles. In 2024, he becomes the first laureate of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès Latitudes program.
David Campany is Creative Director of the International Center of Photography, New York. He has worked worldwide with institutions including MoMA New York, Tate, Whitechapel Gallery London, Centre Pompidou, Le Bal Paris, ICP New York, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, The Photographer’s Gallery London, ParisPhoto, PhotoLondon, The National Portrait Gallery London, Aperture, Steidl, MIT Press, Thames & Hudson, MACK and Frieze.
Clément Chéroux is a French photography historian and curator. He was recently named director of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris; he was previously chief curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Image by Nuits Balnéaires
Image by François-Xavier Gbré
