Josèfa Ntjam’s artistic practice is devoted to crafting speculative, immersive worlds that take shape across a wide constellation of media. In recent years, her kaleidoscopic photomontages and landscapes unfold in human/AI collaborations. With her distinct blend of historical material, bioscientific found footage, and internet content, Ntjam’s defining aesthetics have put her at the forefront of contemporary AI art. Often rooted in the quiet depths of her family archives, each artwork takes its starting point in the refiguring of a colonial past by taking up little-known (her)stories and using them to envision a speculative futurity for the Cameroonian freedom fighters. In this way, her engagement with the Maquisardes (female fighters in the French resistance), the Tirailleurs, and other military figures produced through colonial rule is broader than the limited definitions that may see these figures merely as indentured labourers or apolitical henchmen. In Dislocations (2022) in the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall, we follow such a figure into the depths of the ocean or the cosmos, into a cave reminiscent of the refuges that communist resistance fighters hid in during the Second World War in France—communists who would go on to support the struggle for Cameroonian liberation in later years. In the cave, the figure is surrounded by Tirailleurs and Maquis, which she recognizes as freedom fighters, before dissolving in shape to become united with these historical figures in the cosmos of African futurity.

Two prints in the exhibition link historical and contemporary racialized bodies and distinctively place them in a genealogy with the Maquisardes. The fluid dissolution of bodies, a central motif for queer feminism, is also present in the film Dislocations by Josèfa Ntjam which is shown in the Mrinalini Mukherjee Hall.

ANKL co-produced by Josèfa Ntjam and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), 2026

Works in the exhibition: Dislocations (2022), 1-channel video, colour, sound, 18' , French with En/Ger subs. In collaboration with Sean Hart and Nicolas Pirus, co-produced by Aquatic Invasion Production, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Courtesy of the artist and Nicoletti Gallery; Guardian of the Ancestor’s Echo (2025), photomontage printed by sublimation on aluminium and metal frame, 120 × 180 × 5 cm; ANKL (2026), photomontage printed on plexiglass, diameter: 165 cm. Both courtesy of the artist