Knowledge of the elements, Steffani Jemison
Tuesday 13 Jan 2026 from 7pm to 8:30pm
€12 (free for Centre Pompidou members, upon presentation of membership)
In partnership with the Centre Pompidou
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 exchangee into a prolonged meditation on language, listening and movement.Performers 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 uses movement and language as tools for material and spiritual research, operating in the seam between conceptual and embodied knowledge.
Her work is often rooted in the contents of the archive and encompasses a variety of media, including video, sculpture, drawing, and live performance.
In her work Jemison addresses American culture and vernacular as well as the tensions between the private, social, and political spheres through a variety of means, examining the structures and testing the limits of narrative storytelling and linear time.
Jemison’s interdisciplinary practice explores themes of possibility, perspective, proximity, and understanding, in an ongoing body of work anchored in insights that cross boundaries of time and space.
Steffani Jemison has taken part in numerous solo and group shows at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Genève, CH (2024); Greene Naftali, New York, US (2024; 2021); Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam, NE (2022; 2020); Madragoa, Lisbon, PT (2021); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NE (2019); De Appel, Amsterdam, NE (2019); Jeu de Paume, Paris, FR (2017); CAPC, Bordeaux, FR (2017); MASS MoCA, North Adams, US (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2017); RISD Museum, Providence, US (2015); The Museum of Modern Art, New York, US (2015); Whitney Biennial, New York, US (2019); and Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, US (2019–2020), among others.
Solo screening programs include Art of the Real at Lincoln Center, New York, US (2018) and Conversations at the Edge at the Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, US (2018).