Valentin Noujaïm: La Défense
Exhibition
To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion. 2024. France. Directed by Valentin Noujaïm. Courtesy the artist and Oyster Films.
At the Des Moines Art Center, French Lebanese artist and filmmaker Valentin Noujaïm turns Paris’s La Défense business district into the setting of a film trilogy about belonging, alienation, and resistance.
The Des Moines Art Center presents Valentin Noujaïm: La Défense, an exhibition devoted to the work of French-Lebanese filmmaker and artist Valentin Noujaïm. On view September 10–December 6, 2026, the exhibition brings together his three-part film series exploring Paris from its margins.
The trilogy takes its name from La Défense, Paris’s vast business district of glass-and-steel towers. For Noujaïm, this highly constructed landscape becomes a stage for stories of displacement, suspicion, and resistance.
The series opens with Pacific Club (2022), which revisits the story of a nightclub that operated in an underground parking garage in the 1980s and became a gathering place for young people of Arab descent from the Paris suburbs. Volume 2: To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024) turns to surreal fiction, following a businesswoman who fantasizes about destroying the office tower she has been hired to sell. In Volume 3: Demons to Diamonds (2025), Noujaïm imagines an unsettling La Défense where, every day at 6:59 p.m., a worker takes their own life. Together, the three films explore alienation, isolation, and paranoia, while placing characters who challenge the systems around them at the heart of the story.
Trained as a filmmaker, Noujaïm creates immersive, cinematic works that draw on film noir, documentary, and dystopian fiction to explore alienation, identity, and what it means to be an outsider in contemporary France.
Curated by Associate Curator Ashton Cooper. Support for this exhibition is provided by Albertine Visual Arts, a program of Albertine Foundation and Villa Albertine.