The first major monographic exhibition in France devoted to Jo Ractliffe opens at the Jeu de Paume under the title En ces lieux. The exhibition retraces more than forty years of work, from 1982 to 2025, offering a rigorous and coherent reading of one of the most significant figures in contemporary South African photography, whose work has so far been rarely presented in France. At the heart of the exhibition is not the historical event itself, but the way history settles into places. The landscapes photographed by Ractliffe, in South Africa and Angola, are often devoid of human figures, marked by an apparent stillness that contrasts with the political and social violence that has shaped them. The artist deliberately avoids direct illustration of conflict, focusing instead on traces, voids and absences, inviting the viewer to question what remains after the action has passed. The exhibition moves through some of the most emblematic series of her career, from her early photographs of the 1980s to the bodies of work produced in Angola after 2007, in territories devastated by civil war and by the legacies of the Cold War. In these images, the landscape becomes a silent archive, capable of holding individual and collective memory without ever turning into a didactic document. A central aspect of the exhibition is the reflection on the notion of “place”, understood not as a simple geographical location but as a space dense with historical, political and symbolic layers. This approach finds a synthesis in the previously unseen series The Garden, produced with the support of the Jeu de Paume and presented here for the first time. The private gardens along South Africa’s west coast, assembled from reclaimed materials, emerge as acts of resistance and of community rebuilding, responding to the pressure of extractive industries and real estate development. Taken as a whole, En ces lieux offers a measured and coherent vision of a body of work that has made distance, formal restraint and attention to time into critical tools. Jo Ractliffe’s photography does not seek shock or explicit denunciation, but entrusts the landscape with the task of making visible what continues to act in the present, even when it appears to have disappeared.
