Nearly 150 artists, curators, and other cultural figures signed an open letter denouncing the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s decision to abruptly call off an exhibition centering on contemporary Franco-Creole, Caribbean French, and Guyanese art. The cancellation, which was formalized in a June 10 notice, followed months of planning and a series of tense text message exchanges between the museum’s director Chiara Parisi and guest curator Claire Tancons, Le Monde reported.
Slated to run from the end of October 2026 through the beginning of April 2027, the survey Van Lévé: Sovereign Visions from the Maroon and Creole Americas and Amazonia would have gathered the works of dozens of artists from across the French Caribbean region, including Julien Creuzet, who represented France at last year’s Venice Biennale; Gaëlle Choisne, who won last year’s Prix Marcel Duchamp; and the late Haitian-born painter Hervé Télémaque, Libération reported.
In late May, Tancons raised concerns to Parisi about an overlap between the runtime of Van Lévé and Maurizio Cattelan’s ongoing Endless Sunday exhibition, which is scheduled to run through February 2, 2027. The latter displays the artist’s 36-foot marble middle-finger sculpture “L.O.V.E.” (2010) in one of the same galleries where the group survey of Caribbean art would be partially held. Parisi told Tancons that the two shows would have to coexist in the same space.
“You have a large gallery. If you feel that your project can only exist on the condition of the Forum, then perhaps we should rediscuss the dates. And if you think that what we are proposing does not respect your vision, we would be very sad if you decided not to continue this wonderful adventure,” Parisi wrote to Tancons, who replied: “I don’t know how to work without respect for keeping one’s word, without respect for contractual terms.”
The next morning, Tancons received an email from the Centre Pompidou-Metz’s general secretariat, which was followed less than two weeks later by the formal letter cancelling the exhibition due to a “particularly difficult budgetary context.”
In the wake of the exhibition’s termination, Tancons sent a letter to the French Ministry of Culture sharply rebuking the seeming hypocrisy of the museum’s decision.
“This brutal and shocking cancellation, which comes at a time when Paris Noir is triumphing in Paris at the Centre Pompidou, calls into question the double discourse regarding the artistic productions of Afro-descendant and Caribbean artists and the difficulty curators from their territories have in promoting their stories,” the curator wrote in a June 10 letter to the agency, according to Le Monde. The letter referenced the recently concluded survey Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou, which revisited the works of 150 African diasporic artists working across the Modern and Post-Modern cultural landscape.
“The cancellation announced by the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and presented as being for budgetary reasons, is a tell-tale sign,” reads the open letter decrying the rescission. Its signatories include artists who were slated to participate in the survey, like Tabita Rézaire, Jimmy Robert, Minia Biabiany and Raphaël Barontini.
“A female Guadeloupean exhibition curator will always be overly ambitious, even if her international reputation is well established and she fundraised to cover nearly half of the budget for her exhibition,” the letter continued, alluding to a $500,000 (€430,000) grant from the Ford Foundation for the show.
Hyperallergic has contacted Tancons, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, and the Ford Foundation for comment.
The letter asserts that in spite of the cancellation, Van Lévé will move forward at a different venue. Echoing this sentiment, Biabiany, one of the signatories, told Hyperallergic in an email she is “convinced that another institution abroad is ready to welcome Van Lévé.” She had planned to exhibit the bamboo video work “Toli Toli” (2018) and an installation consisting of ceramic, sugarcane leaves and sound that will be shown at the São Paulo Biennale later this year.
The Centre Pompidou-Metz did not directly contact any of the artists about the exhibition’s cancellation, Bianiany said.
She thinks an alternative venue in France would be “ideal” in terms of decolonizing present French history.
“It can mark a turn,” Biabiany said. “This being said, our voices exist with and without the French cultural world for sure.”