The Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson presents the exhibition Nuits Balnéaires : Eboro.
In recent years, Nuits Balnéaires has developed a hybrid practice. The Ivorian artist works at the crossroads of fine arts, fashion, and research. His influences bring together cinema, literature, theater, performance, and cultural history. His life is both rooted in the small coastal town of Grand-Bassam, east of Abidjan, and open to multiple international cultural communities.
Eboro was created as part of the Latitudes program of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, of which Nuits Balnéaires is the second laureate. This project introduces a more autobiographical dimension to Nuits Balnéaires’s work. The project begins in Dakar, Senegal: on July 22, 1986, his uncle Noël X. Ebony, a renowned journalist and playwright, disappeared under enigmatic circumstances.
“There is an inexplicable bond between us, perhaps stemming from transgenerational memory,” confides Nuits Balnéaires. In the Agni-Bona tradition of Côte d’Ivoire, by which the artist is deeply imbued, the nephew plays a key role in accompanying the uncle on his passage to the afterlife. For Nuits Balnéaires, this took the form of an exploration of how earlier trajectories – historical or familial – influence or predetermine our own life paths.
Nuits Balnéaires conceived Eboro intuitively, allowing the affective power of places and family memory to shape the interconnected visual chapters of this multilayered work. He embraces the melancholy and trauma linked to his uncle’s story with gentleness and hope, questioning how imagination can contribute to healing transgenerational wounds.
Nuits Balnéaires
Multidisciplinary artist and poet, Nuits Balnéaires was born and raised in Abidjan, within a family of Akan Agni-Bona and Malinké origin. Drawing on intimate ties to the traditions, culture, and spirituality of these two peoples, his work creates a parallel space-time, beyond geographical constraints, while embracing the universality of the oceans as interaction between worlds.
Nuits Balnéaires maintains powerful ties with the energy of the Gulf of Guinea and its landscapes, hence the omnipresence of water in his photographic practice, films, and poetry. Inhabited by the duality of life and death, as well as by the possibility of communication between these two states, his work conveys a euphoric sense of tranquility, both classical and contemporary.
In 2019, Nuits Balnéaires settled in Grand-Bassam, Côte d’Ivoire, to develop his artistic practice, drawing on years of experience as a fashion and conceptual photographer. He received a one-year fellowship in visual journalism from the World Press Photo Foundation and was among the laureates of a call for projects launched in 2020 by the Goethe-Institut and the Prince Claus Fund, which supports cultural and artistic initiatives addressing environmental change.
Nuits Balnéaires’s work has been exhibited at Art X Lagos, at the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in Paris, at FNB Art in Johannesburg, as well as in Côte d’Ivoire, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Australia.
Curatorship
David Campany
Artistic Director, International Center of Photography (ICP), New York
Exhibition
Nuits Balnéaires : Eboro
Through October 4, 2026
Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson
79 Rue des Archives
75003 Paris, France
www.henricartierbresson.org
Publication
Nuits Balnéaires : Eboro
Publishers: Atelier EXB and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès
Interview with David Campany, Artistic Director of ICP, New York
Poems by Noël X. Ebony
Available in two versions: French and English
Swiss binding paperback 22.5 x 30 cm
140 pages
ISBN: 978-2-36511-446-2
€45
www.exb.fr
