Nanténé Traoré — pays des merveilles

From 30 September to 29 November 2026, the MEP presents _pays des merveilles_, the first monographic museum exhibition dedicated to Nanténé Traoré. Through a vivid exploration of intimate imagery, his work offers a meditation on memory, attachment and disappearance. Nanténé Traoré's return to the Breton coast, a place he had visited as a child with his mother, brought traumatic memories back to the surface and marked the beginning of a period of profound depression and dissociation. Made using expired film stock dating from the 1990s, these images convey a state of disorientation in which reality seems to slip away. The film's chemical alterations transform colours, blur contours and produce unstable, almost ghostly visions. In this landscape shaped by memory, his walks become a way of redirecting his attention towards the surrounding world and the elements that compose it: shorelines, birds, stray dogs, and familiar sleeping figures. His gaze settles on the fragile beauty of beings and places destined to fade away. Bathed in hazy blue and orange light, the images blur the boundaries between forms: bodies become landscapes, and landscapes become reflections of inner states. The film extends this experience of dissolution: a fixed shot of a landscape is accompanied by the artist's inner voice, guiding us into the heart of this sensitive and memory-filled drift. The exhibition brings together a new analogue photographic project, created in Brittany in the summer of 2025, as well as a film made during a residency in Albania in the summer of 2026. Curation by Victoria Aresheva.