Chloé Quenum

Chloé Quenum, born in France in 1983, is an artist. She graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2011. She will take up a residency at the Manufacture de la Cristallerie Saint-Louis in 2019 as part of the Fondation Hermès program. Winner of the Mondes Nouveaux program supported by the French Ministry of Culture, in 2023 she will present the installation Épopée at the Hôtel de Ragueneau, Bordeaux. Since 2012, her work has been the subject of regular solo exhibitions, most recently “Wonder Wander”, Florence Loewy, Paris (2023); “Overseas”, Les Bains-Douches, Alençon (2020). Chloé Quenum will represent Benin at the 60th Venice Biennale alongside artists Ishola Akpo, Moufouli Bello and Romuald Hazoumè, curated by Azu Nwagbogu.

During her residency at Villa Medici, Chloé Quenum will continue her research into the archives of Nella Larsen – a member of the Harlem Renaissance movement whose novel Passing (1929) is an attempt to transgress the problem of segregation and racial discrimination – in order to circumscribe their location and typology, and to devise a project that pays tribute to her existence. In correlation with this research, she will begin the prefiguration phase of a new body of work that reflects on the perceptions we project onto others, which are largely based on an arbitrary and subjective system linked to optics and the sense of sight.