Jean-François Boclé is an artist based in Paris. He was born in Martinique in 1971 where he lived for 17 years. He studied art at the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges (1992-95) and at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (1995-98). His work has been displayed, among other places, at the Van Gogh Museum, at the Saatchi Gallery in London (group show Pangaea: New Art from Africa and Latin America in 2015 and 2019), at the Queens Museum (Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, New York), at the National Museum of World Culture (Stockholm), at the CCK Centro Cultural Kirchner (Buenos Aires), at the MAC Bolivia, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo-MAC (Chili) at the MAC Panamá, at the MAC Puerto Rico, at the Mémorial ACTe (Guadeloupe), at the Kunsthal KadE (Netherlands), at the Pabellón Cuba (La Habana), at the CUC Liverpool (UK).

He participated in 13 international biennials in Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Jean-François Boclé is represented in the public collection of the FNAC Fond National d’Art Contemporain and in private collections such as the Saatchi Collection.  His work seeks to highlight the relationship between forces and violence that govern the functioning of our world since the first step of Cristóbal Colón on an island in the Bahamas. He thus tries to trace the path to the possibility of a \”WE\” that does not rest on the exploitation of \”THE OTHER\”.  For more than 25 years, Boclé has been marked by the historicity of violence. He constantly raises the question of what a memorial of the innumerable can be in the context of the Plantationocene.  Practicing poetry since the age of 15, since 2021 he has been writing prose to be published by Editions Dickersbach Kunstverlag / Protocollum Berlin): Les Chroniques de Mamoudzou (2021-2023), Les Chroniques Dakaroises, and Les Chroniques de la possession.  Boclé chronicles his everyday life, but also the meals he shares with friends, his interventions in prison, in a slum, in colleges, etc., very often wounded societies marked by the rubble.  These chronicles will be published in French and English to break any language isolation.