With "I Would Follow Her by Ground and Sea," presented at the Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Paris, Ayana V. Jackson offers a dense and rigorous reflection on photography as a space of power, memory, and historical reconfiguration. The exhibition does not simply bring together major body of work; it juxtaposes several moments in her practice to question what images have done to bodies, and what bodies can still do to images.
Ayana V. Jackson, Sleep to Dream, 2017. Courtesy of the Artist and Mariane Ibrahim
At the heart of Jackson's approach lies a questioning of photography itself, of how images have contributed to shaping historical narratives and enduring systems of representation, and of the medium's capacity for self-reflection. Drawing on visual archives from the 19th century, Jackson explores these questions.e and XXe For centuries, the artist has not sought to restore a lost truth, but to make visible the processes of historical construction through images. For her, photography is never a simple document: it becomes a space for analysis and re-examination.
The ground floor of the exhibition is dedicated to three works from the series From the Deep: In the Wake of DrexciyaInspired by the Afrofuturist universe of the techno duo Drexciya, which imagines an underwater civilization born from pregnant African women thrown into the sea during the transatlantic slave trade, Jackson shifts his gaze from this mythological imagery to the abyss. But this abyss is not treated as a place of annihilation: it becomes a space of transformation, an imaginary territory where historical violence is acknowledged without being frozen in victimhood. The images, often dark and sculptural, evoke a sacred and aquatic iconography that rejects neutrality.
In these photographs, Jackson uses his own body as an anchor. This choice is neither performative in the spectacular sense nor strictly autobiographical. Rather, it is a methodological strategy: by embodying figures absent from the archives, the artist challenges the supposed distance between subject, photographer, and viewer. The body becomes a site of transmission, but also a critical tool that reveals the artificiality of the poses, categories, and narratives imposed by Western visual history.
Upstairs, the exhibition expands to include works from other series, including Dear Sarah (2016) et You Forgot to See Me Coming (2023). These collections continue a reflection on how Black women have been inscribed or erased from historical narratives.
In Dear SarahJackson revisits Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a 19th-century figure navigating between slavery, imperial protection, and forced assimilation. The photographs highlight the violence inherent in the acts of naming and depicting, while also underscoring the identity fragmentation produced by these processes.
You Forgot to See Me Coming introduces a geographical and tonal shift. By focusing on Afro-descendant and Indigenous women involved in armed conflicts of the early 20th centurye In the 19th century, particularly the Mexican Revolution, Jackson introduced a form of calculated lightness. Humor and playfulness became tools of historiographical disruption, revealing the extent to which the omission of women in liberation narratives stems from a structural choice.
Recent events lend this exhibition a particular resonance. The public questioning of Jackson's work by the American administration in 2025 serves as a reminder that images remain a battleground. Far from weakening his work, this controversy underscores the acuity of his approach: to insist on history precisely where it is unsettling, where it is contested or threatened with erasure.
“I Would Follow Her by Ground and Sea” thus affirms a demanding conception of contemporary photography, which becomes not a medium of symbolic reparation, but a critical space where memory, representation, and responsibility converge. By working with and against the archive, Ayana V. Jackson reminds us that looking is always a political act, and that certain images continue, stubbornly, to look back at us.
“Ayana V. Jackson: I Would Follow Her by Ground and Sea”
Mariane Ibrahim Gallery
18, avenue Matignon, Paris 8e
