Meet the 2026 Étant donnés Grantees

The Des Moines Art Center presents two solo exhibitions exploring migration, immigration, and systemic inequality.

Valentin Noujaïm – La Défense

Valentin Noujaïm creates cinematic works blending documentary, fiction, and dystopian aesthetics to examine marginality in contemporary France. His “La Défense” trilogy uses the Paris business district as both setting and symbol, depicting it as an artificial, anonymous space shaped by power and exclusion. Across three films, Noujaïm moves from archival narratives of underground Arab youth culture to surreal and speculative scenarios revealing alienation within corporate environments.

Combining noir, science, and fiction tropes, the trilogy critiques social hierarchies, surveillance, and invisibility, offering a haunting reflection on belonging, urban space, and systemic inequality.

Bouchra Khalili – The Speeches Series

Bouchra Khalili develops research-based, collaborative films addressing migration, political agency, and resistance. The Speeches Series is a three-part work in which migrants in Paris, Genoa, and New York perform speeches drawn from revolutionary texts or personal manifestos. Through acts of translation, memorization, and public speaking, participants reclaim voice and visibility while reflecting on citizenship, labor, and exclusion. Each chapter foregrounds lived experiences shaped by displacement and inequality, linking historical struggles to contemporary conditions. By centering orality and collective authorship, Khalili transforms testimony into political expression, questioning structures of power and redefining belonging.

About Valentin Noujaïm

Valentin Noujaïm (b. 1991, France) studied screenwriting at La Fémis in Paris and was a guest student at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His work explores marginalized communities and challenges dominant narratives through cinematic forms combining 16mm film, archival materials, digital footage, and special effects. His films have screened at major festivals including CPH:DOX, Visions du Réel, IFFR Rotterdam, and BlackStar. In 2024, Pacific Club was shortlisted for a César Award. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Fondation Cartier and Museo Madre, and he presented his first institutional solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel in 2025.

About Bouchra Khalili

Bouchra Khalili (b. 1975, Casablanca) studied Film & Media at Sorbonne Nouvelle and Visual Arts in Paris-Cergy. Working across film, installation, photography, and publishing, she examines colonial legacies, migration, and political agency through narratives of resistance and memory. Her practice combines documentary and conceptual strategies, foregrounding voices often excluded from dominant histories. Khalili has presented major solo exhibitions internationally, including at MoMA, Jeu de Paume, and MACBA, and participated in major biennials, such as Venice and Documenta. The recipient of numerous awards, she is a professor of Contemporary Art in Vienna and co-founder of La Cinémathèque de Tanger.

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Photo: Valentin Noujaïm, La Défense Volume 2: To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (still), 2024. Film, 14 min. Courtesy of the artist.   

Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions of the Creole and Maroon Caribbean and Amazonias is a transhistorical group exhibition bringing together contemporary artists from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyana, Haïti, and their diasporas. Combining artworks, artifacts, and archives, it traces artistic practices from ancient times through post-slavery histories to the present. The project explores questions of sovereignty, memory, and environmental consciousness, moving beyond the “Plantationocene” toward new imaginaries. Rooted in Caribbean perspectives, it connects historical research with contemporary creation, highlighting established and emerging artistic voices. Presented across sites including Harvard’s Alain Locke Gallery and Guadeloupe’s MACTe, the exhibition fosters dialogue on colonial legacies, identity, and the future of Caribbean art.

• Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc
• Franky Amété
• Raphaël Barontin
• Minia Biabiany
• Ernest Breleur
• Jean-Marc Bullet
• Gaëlle Choisne
• Ronald Cyrille
• Kenny Dunkan
• Gwladys Gambie
• David Gumbs
• Clémence Lollia Hilaire
• Fabiola Jean-Louis
• Louisa Marajo
• Olivier Marbœuf
• Tessa Mars
• Manuel Mathieu
• Jimmy Robert
• Cédrine Scheidig

Explore the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research’s Website

Photo: Gwladys Gambie, Anatomie du Sensible series, 2019-2021, Mixed media drawing on paper 

Wilfrid Almendra participates in Because the Sky is Blue, a CMCA-wide group exhibition exploring themes of loss, catastrophe, and the symbolic power of the sky within contemporary painting and expanded visual practices. The exhibition brings together artists from Maine and abroad in a reflection on the boundaries between painting, image-making, and conceptual practice.

Almendra, primarily known for sculpture, contributes a major new site-specific installation composed of glass panels, natural materials, and cast aluminum elements. Installed in the museum’s largest gallery, the work engages with transparency, absence, and architectural light, creating a sculptural counterpoint to two-dimensional works in the exhibition. His practice, rooted in material experimentation and everyday economies, resonates with the show’s broader inquiry into perception, memory, and the emotional registers of form.

About Wilfrid Almendra

Wilfrid Almendra (b. 1972 in Cholet) lives and works between Marseille and Casario, Portugal. His practice is rooted in a close relationship between ideas and materials, drawing from everyday architectures, surfaces, and forms that shape our environments. Working with materials often sourced through alternative economies such as barter and exchange, he explores tensions between social class, comfort, and invention. His work reveals the poetic potential embedded in ordinary materials and systems. Almendra has exhibited widely in France and internationally in institutions such as the Palais de Tokyo, Centre Pompidou-Metz, and MCA Chicago, and continues to develop a practice that links social realities, material culture, and spatial experience.

Website

Photo : Wilfrid Almendra: The Dog’s Sweat, installation view at DOCUMENT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2024. Photo: Vasco Stocker Vilhena.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will host French industrial designer Inga Sempé’s first North American exhibition from November 21, 2026 — September 19, 2027. The museum’s Collab Design Excellence Award event honoring Sempé will kick off the exhibition, which will feature about forty works of furniture, lighting, textiles, and objects and highlight Sempé’s experimental approach to everyday materials. By deconstructing functional archetypes, Sempé reimagines design through color, light, and form. Accompanied by a publication and public programs, the exhibition will expand access to Sempé’s influential yet under-recognized practice in North America. The exhibition is curated by Tiffany Lambert, the museum’s Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer Curator of Modern and Contemporary Design.

The exhibition catalogue will situate Sempé’s thirty-year practice within a global art-historical context. Through newly commissioned, women-authored essays, this volume will expand a discourse that, until now, has been limited and narrowly represented in existing literature. The publication will make a lasting contribution to scholarship on this noted French designer and will comprise of:

• An introductory essay by Lambert that foregrounds Sempé’s contemporary impact while illuminating hidden histories of women designers.
• An essay by Camille Okhio, which will examine Sempé’s contemporary work in the historic period rooms of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, revealing how contemporary interventions disrupt traditional—and often untold—narratives.
• A photographic essay by Adrianna Glaviano, which will feature an interview between Sempé and architectural and urban historian Meredith TenHoor, situating Sempé’s objects in her home and studio.
• A concluding biography, exhibition history, and list of works.

About Inga Sempé

Inga Sempé (b. in Paris in 1968) is an internationally recognized industrial designer known for her refined and innovative approach to contemporary design. A graduate of ENSCI – Les Ateliers in Paris (1993), she began her career working with Marc Newson and later Andrée Putman before receiving a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome (2000–2001). She has collaborated with leading international design brands including HAY, Ligne Roset, Alessi, Iittala, and Kvadrat, while maintaining her own studio practice in Paris. Her work has received major awards such as the Red Dot Design Award and the Elle Décor International Design Award. With her works widely exhibited at major museums, she continues to shape contemporary furniture and object design internationally.

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Photo: Inga Sempé, Brosse, Edra, 2003

Kelly Sinnapah Mary’s first solo institutional exhibition in the United States will be jointly presented by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Americas Society. Bringing together approximately 40 works from the past decade alongside new site-specific installations, the exhibition offers a comprehensive view of her practice across two immersive environments. This collaboration expands visibility for the artist while fostering dialogue around diasporic histories, colonial legacies, and identity. Accompanied by public programs and a co-published monograph, the project highlights Sinnapah Mary’s unique contribution to contemporary art.

About Kelly Sinnapah Mary

Kelly Sinnapah Mary (b. 1981, Guadeloupe) creates paintings, sculptures, and installations exploring folklore, history, diaspora, and the natural world. Rooted in her Caribbean environment and ancestral heritage, her work draws on memories, mythologies, and postcolonial narratives. A central figure, the hybrid character Sanbras, embodies layered identities through references to literature, religion, and ecology. Sinnapah Mary challenges colonial hierarchies by reimagining relationships between humans, animals, and nature, emphasizing interdependence and care. Influenced by Caribbean thinkers such as Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé, her practice merges reality and fiction. Her work has been exhibited internationally and recognized with major awards and institutional support.

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Photo : Kelly Marie Sinnapah, The Book of Violette, The Rosary, 2025, © Erin Brady Dan Bradica Studio

Valérie John’s first U.S. solo exhibition, Et si la mer n’était pas bleue / and if the sea was not blue, will be presented by the Center for Art, Research and Alliances in collaboration with Palais de Tokyo. Bringing together textile and installation works, the exhibition explores Afro-diasporic histories through John’s concept of “métier à métisser,” a cross-cultural weaving practice. Using materials such as indigo and pagne, her immersive environments evoke layered memories and colonial legacies. Accompanied by performances, publications, and translations, the project expands access to her work while fostering dialogue on cultural transmission, memory, and transnational histories.

About Valérie John

Valérie John (b.1964 in Fort-de-France) is a visual artist whose practice explores memory, displacement, and identity through textile-based and mixed-media works. Trained in art and semiotics at the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne in the early 1980s, she began researching the symbolic and mnemonic dimensions of the pagne, a study that led her to Senegal in 1983 and immersion in Dakar’s avant-garde Laboratoire Agit’art. From 1998 onward, she developed a palimpsestic practice combining woven textiles, paper, indigo dye, and found objects such as books and clothing. Her work reflects Afro-diasporic histories, Atlantic crossings, and material memory, and has been exhibited internationally across Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

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Photo: Valérie John, I telman nwè ki i blé [It is so dark that it is blue], 1998–2023, installation, mixed technique, woven papers, pigments and illumination (gold) and aluminum hook, 600 x 300 x 30 cm. © Valérie John

Polina Moroz’s commission coincides with the museum’s 50th anniversary (2026–2027) and the reimagining of its street-level lobby as a free, publicly accessible communal space in New York’s East Village. The project introduces one of the first site-specific works to shape this new environment. Working in direct dialogue with the architecture, Moroz combines organic forms, tactile materials, and spatial design to blur the boundary between functional object and artwork. A suspended patchwork tapestry in shades of blue descends from above, evoking an unfolded sky; a bespoke torchère lamp integrates light as sculpture within the lobby’s new reading area. Together, the interventions transform the entrance into a lived, experiential environment shaped by domesticity, memory, and collective use.

About Polina Moroz

Polina Moroz (b. 1992, Kyiv) is a Paris-based artist who works across painting, installation, and object design. She holds degrees from the National Academy of Fine Arts in Ukraine and a Master’s in Spatial Experiments from Lund University, Sweden. Her research collaborations include NASA and Nankai University. Since 2022, she has been part of the French collective Diamètre 15. Her practice explores crisis, resilience, and forms of transcendence through object-based and spatial work.

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Photo: Polina Moroz, Welcome Blue (concept sketch), 2026. Colored pencil on paper. Courtesy of the artist. 

MoMA PS1 will host the first US solo-museum show of a French artist in the spring of 2027. Combining new and existing work, the exhibition focuses on image construction through a practice that encompasses film, photography, and sculpture. Announcement is forthcoming.

Website

Photo: Courtesy MoMA PS1 © Noel Woodford

Noémie Goudal: Sacro Bosco will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States, presented at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. The exhibition introduces American audiences to her multi-disciplinary practice, which combines photography, film, sculpture, and installation to explore perception, illusion, and geological “deep time.”
Bringing together works from 2013 to the present, the exhibition includes approximately thirty pieces, among them recent video works Grand Vide and Supra Strata. It also features a new commission developed during a research residency in South Florida, engaging directly with the region’s ecological landscape, including the Everglades.

Through this transatlantic dialogue between French artistic practice and American environments, the exhibition reflects on how we perceive planetary change, time, and nature, while supporting broader institutional partnerships and future touring opportunities across the United States.

About Noémie Goudal

Noémie Goudal (b. 1984) is a visual artist whose practice combines photography, film, sculpture, installation, and performance through meticulously staged, illusionistic landscapes. A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, she constructs large-scale environments that are then photographed or filmed, expanding the boundaries of photographic representation into immersive spatial experiences. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of ecology, anthropology, and geology, engaging with concepts of deep time and paleoclimatology. By juxtaposing human perception with planetary timescales, she reveals the Earth as a constantly shifting system. Goudal has exhibited internationally in major institutions and biennials, and her work is held in leading museum collections worldwide.

Website

Photo: Noémie Goudal (French, born 1984), Making of Supra Strata, 2024, © Studio Noémie Goudal 

Some Spectacle or Satellite is an international collaboration between The Kitchen and Centre Pompidou that explores French-American avant-garde legacies through performance, video, and live broadcast between New York and Paris. Developed during a moment when both institutions are temporarily operating outside their permanent homes, the project treats institutional mobility as a creative framework for experimentation and exchange. It commissions new works by artists in movement, music, film, and performance alongside historical works from both institutions’ media art archives. Presented simultaneously across both cities through live transmission, it examines presence, circulation, and mediation. The collaboration culminates with an exhibition and scholarly convening that traces transmission-based practices history.

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Photo : Cafe Barbie, The Kitchen’s first Electronic Café in 1994. John Hanhardt and Holly Brubach joined her live in a panel, while Raquel Welch and Camille Paglia appeared in pre-recorded tapes, and Lauren Hutton spoke in a phone interview. 

The exhibition Do You Dream of Electric Sheep draws on Philip K. Dick’s dystopian universe to explore how technology shapes perception, memory, and identity. In a world structured by screens, algorithms, and data, reality becomes increasingly mediated, blending physical and virtual spaces while transforming how we remember, imagine, and dream. Bringing together artists across generations, the project connects historical mnemonic practices with contemporary digital culture, engaging geometry, patterns, and myth-making. Through installations, painting, sculpture, and video, it creates a techno-poetic environment that questions human experience within an evolving, hybrid, and technologically-shaped contemporary condition.

About Ericka Beckman

Active since the 1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, USA) is a pioneering figure of the Pictures Generation whose work helped define early video and performance art. Emerging during a period of technological transition, she developed innovative approaches to montage, editing, sound, and spatial composition using analogue film tools. Her practice draws on game structures, Jean Piaget’s theories of cognitive development, and architecture to construct non-linear, rule-based systems and narratives.

Through these systems, Beckman questions how stories are formed and how perception is organized, linking physical, virtual, and cognitive spaces. Based in New York, she studied at CalArts before moving there in the late 1970s. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and is held in major museum collections including MoMA, the Whitney, The Metropolitan Museum, and the Centre Pompidou.

About Lauren Clay

At the crossroads of sculpture, architecture, and applied arts, Lauren Clay (b. 1982, USA) creates immersive environments combining physical and digital processes. Drawing on paper marbling traditions, she develops trompe-l’oeil marble effects across sculptural forms and large-scale wallpaper installations. Architectural motifs such as windows, arches, and doorways recur throughout her work, blurring boundaries between real and virtual space. These elements function as thresholds into imagined, dreamlike environments that challenge perception. Based in Brooklyn, she holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work is held in major museum collections such as The Metropolitan Museum, The Whitney, and the Deji Museum in China.

About Peter Halley

Emerging as a central figure of the Neo-Conceptualist movement of the 1980s, Peter Halley (b. 1953, USA) developed a distinctive abstract language based on architectural and technological motifs. His paintings feature “cells” and “prisons” connected by linear “conduits” that suggest corridors, circuits, and communication networks. Though abstract, these diagrammatic shapes draw on the spatial logic of apartments, urban grids, and digital systems. Halley’s work reflects on the increasing geometric organization of social space, addressing themes of power, isolation, and connectivity while engaging with contemporary architectural and informational structures. His work is widely exhibited and held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Tate Modern, London, among others.

Website

Photo: Ericka Beckman, Cinderella, 1986. Film still. Courtesy of the artist. ©Ericka Beckman 

Developed at the Camargo Foundation, a residency for artists, scholars, and thinkers in Cassis, France,  Récupérations is a long-term project by Dread Scott and Jenny Polak, developed in close dialogue with scholar Clara Lecadet, that will be presented in 2027 at [mac] musée d’art contemporain de Marseille.

Récupérations explores the historical and contemporary entanglements between Marseille’s urban fabric, the transatlantic slave trade, and present-day migration from Africa into Europe. Developed through archival research in Marseille and collaboration with scholar Clara Lecadet, it traces how 19th-century wealth accumulation shaped architectural forms tied to colonial and commercial expansion. Through prints, objects, and community-engaged performances, the project reactivates these archives to imagine processes of reversal, reclamation, and repair.

Artists Dread Scott and Jenny Polak also engage with contemporary migrant organizers and local histories to connect past systems of extraction with ongoing social realities. By situating Marseille within broader global networks, the project challenges dominant US-centered narratives of slavery, highlighting instead the shared yet uneven histories of Europe and Africa and their continuing cultural, political, and economic consequences.

About Jenny Polak

Jenny Polak creates large-scale public interventions and subtle domestic design subversions that expose and transform unequal social relations. Influenced by her background in architecture, her family’s migration history, and collaborations with affected communities, her work bridges personal and collective narratives. Raised in coastal England, she draws on waterfront imagery such as signals and flotation devices, first seen in her East River project in Lower Manhattan. She has exhibited widely, including at MoMA PS1. Since 2020, she has collaborated with the Fortune Society, co-creating works with formerly incarcerated individuals. Her practice combines research, activism, and community engagement.

About Dread Scott

Dread Scott is a visual artist known for politically charged works confronting racism, power, and American history. His 1989 artwork using the US flag sparked national controversy, condemned by President George H. W. Bush and denounced by the Senate, leading to a landmark United States v. Eichman case after he publicly burned flags in protest. His work has been exhibited internationally and collected by major museums. In 2019, he created Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a large-scale participatory project revisiting the largest uprising of enslaved people in US history.

“In and Beyond the Clinic, Permanent Reconstructions” explores the French movement of Institutional Psychotherapy as both subject and methodology. Expanding ongoing research, the project develops engagements with artists, clinics, and organizations in France, culminating in a 2027 exhibition at CAC Brétigny co-curated with Marion Vasseur-Raluy. It investigates experimental clinical practices that challenge fixed relations and roles, enables reconstruction through various modes of plastic expression, and expands the clinical with social and cultural milieus. Through workshops, reading groups, archival research, and site visits, the project fosters exchanges across disciplines and audiences. It reactivates historical practices to create participatory, decentralized models of knowledge production and artistic engagement.

About Perwana Nazif

Perwana Nazif is a Los Angeles–based writer, curator, and programmer. She serves as artistic director of the Los Angeles Review of Books and teaches at California Institute of the Arts. Her latest curatorial projects include the 2025 Parapraxis Film Festival at Light Industry in New York and an exhibition at JOAN in Los Angeles on François Pain’s archives. She recently edited Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist (semiotext(e), 2025) and is a contributing editor at Parapraxis Magazine. Her practice also includes upcoming archival and translation projects on psychoanalysis and psychiatry.

Photo: © Gillian Garcia

Visual Art, Ecology, and Collective Infrastructures in France

This research visits artist-run galleries, independent publishing houses, and diasporic cultural spaces in Paris and Marseille to study how Black diasporic communities build and sustain collective cultural infrastructure. The research traces how these spaces function as sites of translation, archival activation, and ecological imagination. Findings will inform public writing, curatorial projects, and transnational exchange between French and American practitioners, while contributing to the early development of a site-specific curatorial initiative for art, ecology, and collective study in California’s Tulare Lake Basin, a landscape shaped by Black migration and land stewardship.

About Ariana Faye Allensworth

Ariana Faye Allensworth is a New York-based cultural worker with over 15 years of experience across the arts, design, and education sectors. Her practice focuses on participatory, community-centered projects that explore how culture, memory, and power shape land, belonging, and the built environment. Recent curatorial work includes As Land Remembers, a group exhibition featuring alumni of Denniston Hill at Marian Goodman Gallery. Her current work is rooted in her ancestral ties to Allensworth, California, the first town in the state founded, financed, and governed by Black people, where she is developing a long-term art and ecology initiative.

Photo: © Farah Al-Qasimi

This research project supports the development of a major multi-institutional public art commission that will travel across North America from 2027–2030. During research travel to Paris in Fall 2026, Melanie Kress will work closely with the artist during a key phase of conceptual development while also researching artists in France whose practices engage sculpture, installation, and public participation.

About Mélanie Kress

Melanie Kress is Senior Curator at Public Art Fund in New York City, where she has organized solo exhibitions with artists including Monira Al Qadiri, Genesis Belanger, Torkwase Dyson, Camille Henrot (forthcoming), Edra Soto, and Carmen Winant. She also contributed to the selection of artists for permanent commissions at John F. Kennedy International Airport’s Terminal 6. Previously, she was Curator at High Line Art, overseeing diverse public art projects, as well as education and community engagement initiatives. Kress is also a Critic at Yale University School of Art and holds degrees from Goldsmiths and Barnard College.

Photo: © Liz Ligon