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Jeanne MERCIER
Commissaire d'exposition indépendante

Biography


Occitanie

Co-founder of the platform Afrique in visu, Jeanne Mercier has been a curator and critic since 2006, based between Europe and Africa. For the past 15 years, she has focused on the evolution of the practice of the expanded image, photography, video and installation. She is particularly interested in works that convey counter-narratives, create new imaginary worlds emancipated from imposed schemas, dominant cultures and iconographies. Her last exhibition projects intertwined history, personal genealogies, family traditions, resistance and struggles against all forms of power and oppression. Through personal and collective curatorships, she has recently collaborated with numerous artists and several festivals and institutions in France and abroad : Jeu de Paume Lab, ENSAD Paris, Le 18 in Marrakech, the ICI (Institute of Islamic Cultures) in Paris, Fotofestiwal in Lodz, Kerkennah Festival in Tunisia, the Zinsou Foundation in Benin, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) in Morocco with the exhibition acclaimed “Africa is no island”. She regularly writes for the art press and various books, such as Une Histoire Mondiale des Femmes Photographes (ed. Textuel, 2020) and “Being photographer in Africa, 10 years of Afrique in visu” (ed. Clémentine de la Féronnière, 2017).

Exhibitions


18/06/2026
Till the 8th of November the Jeu de Paume in the French city of Tours offers you the chance to visit the exhibition “La nuit américaine” by DAI guest curator and guest tutor Laila Hida. La nuit américaine (Day for Night) proposes to examine the ways in which contemporary myths are manufactured and stabilized through visual, narrative, and spatial devices that actively participate in the production of reality. It is part of Hida’s long-term project Le Voyage du Phoenix (The Voyage of the Phoenix), a sensitive and critical exploration of the imaginary constructions linked to oasis landscapes, spanning colonial memory, the desire for exoticism, and the contemporary reconfiguration of the gaze. The project examines the mechanisms behind the creation of representations through photography, literature, and cinema, confronting narratives inherited from the 19th century with today’s realities. This exhibition marks a pivotal moment in the project: for the first time, the very tools used to manufacture myth are exhibited, dissected, and placed in tension. In this context, cinema emerges as a central matrix—a model for constructing the gaze and shaping the world.