Performance
Steffani Jemison
Knowledge of the elements
13 Jan 2026
13 Jan 2026
Presented in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Steffani Jemison's new performance questions orientation – our way of placing ourselves in space, as a fundamentally horizontal relationship capable of opening up non-hierarchical and interconnected modes of perception.
By adapting the children's game “Marco Polo”, Jemison transforms a playful exchange e into a prolonged meditation on language, listening and movement.P erformers JaLeel Marques Porcha and Andros Zins-Browne use repetition and play to explore how black life and black geographies are often ignored or rendered elusive by colonial frameworks, and how other forms of relationship can emerge.
Created by Jemison, the performance Knowledge of the elements uses speech to evoke – while simultaneously subverting – a conception of the position of the body or the subject, inviting the audience to rethink their own positioning.
Centred on the Agora at Lafayette Anticipations, the performance envelops the audience, combining narration, wordplay, written sequences and improvisation.
This creation is part of the In Succession corpus, a series of video and performance interventions that ask questions such as: How can we think of our bodies as supports – structures – just like bricks and beams? How can we learn ‘on the fly’? How can we fly? If we can only rely on ourselves, how can we use ourselves to find the forms of the future?
The performance is followed by a lecture with Steffani Jemison.
Steffani Jemison
Steffani Jemison lives and works in Brooklyn. The artist cultivates an interdisciplinary practice blending video sculpture, drawing and performance. She is interested in the body, movement, constellations, and American vernacular culture.
Her work is in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum, the Kunstmuseum den Haag, Palazzo Grassi, the Whitney Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, among others.
Current and recent solo exhibitions include Lafayette Anticipations (2025), the Wadsworth Atheneum (2025), the Centre d’art contemporain Genève (2024), and Greene Naftali (2023).
Recent group exhibitions include air de repos (CAPC Bordeaux, 2024); Flight Into Egypt (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2024); Movements Toward Freedom (Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, 2024); and the Counterpublic Triennial 2023.
Her commissioned performances have been presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Nottingham Contemporary, MoMA, and other venues. Jemison’s writing has been published in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, and other venues; her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022.
About the exhibition: clear skies / troubled water
On 12 February 1831, Nat Turner, a man enslaved on a plantation in Southampton, Virginia, witnessed an eclipse, seeing in it the hand of a black man covering the sun. He interpreted this as a sign, heralding an uprising that he would come to lead. In November of the same year, he was arrested along with the other rebels and sentenced to death.
clear skies / troubled water examines the stirrings of revolt and vicissitudes of suppression—from the uprisings in 1831 to the riots that rose in the cities of Boston, Détroit, Cincinnati and Newark in the summer of 1967—through the prism of natural phenomena (eclipses, wind patterns, variations in light and gravity).
The movement toward emancipation appears here not as a linear path, but rather as an uncertain journey, comprising setbacks and revivals. The artist Steffani Jemison explores flight as a creative and political gesture: a way of plotting alternative coordinates, improvising new forms of presence, and marking out futures that the body can bear.
Here, “atmosphere” goes beyond a simple question of climate. It acts as a sensitive power, charged with memory and invisible tensions. It conceals structures that influence our trajectories and limit our path. Like the verse of a ruttier—poems that sailors learned by heart to navigate no matter the weather—the exhibition invites us to pay attention to imperceptible currents.
Last year, Steffani Jemison was awarded the Galeries Lafayette Group Production Grant for her presentation in Art Basel Paris’ Emergence sector, in the frame of a partnership between the two organizations in 2024. She was invited for a residency at Lafayette Anticipations during which she conceived this exhibition.
€ 12/ Free for POP' members
Buy ticketsWhere
Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
9, rue du Plâtre
75004 Paris
When
13 Jan 2026
From 7pmPartners
Lafayette Anticipations x Centre Pompidou
Steffani Jemison, Pont-Bridge, videostill, 2025
© Steffani Jemison