Looking racism and discrimination squarely in the face to better combat them: a powerful exhibition at the Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris

Looks. Frank, direct, sometimes abrupt. Numbers. Terrible, worrying, edifying. Words. Strong, moving, committed. Here is a summary of the three strong points of the exhibition At the originspresented until August 23 at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, east of Paris. On the walls of this ancient temple of triumphant colonization, anonymous heroes place us at the crossroads of gazes. Like these young boxers photographed by Jane Evelyn Atwood chosen to illustrate the poster. The exhibition is produced in partnership with a European Union research program in a highly flammable context characterized by the upsurge in racist and anti-Semitic acts for several years.

According to Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifou, researcher and curator of the exhibition, it is “show racism and discrimination from the perspective of those who have suffered them or who still suffer them on a daily basis. Not to look at them as objects, as we did, but as subjects in their own right, who think, who are ironic, who love, who repair, who struggle“.

Constance Rivière, director of the National Museum of the History of Immigration, speaks about “several fairly complicated challenges to overcome“: talking about racism without “redouble it by showing works which are its dazzling manifestation“, without re-exposing those who are victims to forms of suffering and without “make lead”. As if to clear land that she knows is explosive, she adds: “When we talk about systemic or institutional discrimination, we are not saying that France, as a country, is racist and discriminatory. We are saying that if we do not see what is systemic in the discrimination, we are missing a very large part of the subject.”

Understanding what realities we are talking about today is, according to her, “something that makes you want to fight“. The outburst of hate speech which followed the election of several black mayors in the last municipal elections in the Paris region shows, if need be, that there is still work to be done.

Forty-three artists, of twenty different nationalities, express themselves on the walls of this exhibition intended to then travel to other European countries. Deliberately dense and polyphonic, it mixes artistic language and scientific language, without always avoiding the pitfall of abstruse jargon. Its three parts are entitled for example: undoing the order of the gaze, prevented rights and the assembly of the living.

Very strong, the work of the artist Roméo Mivekannin revisits a document from the collection of anthropological photos of Prince Roland Bonaparte dating from the end of the 19th century, the Venus Hottentot. On the body of this callipyge woman, seen from the back and from the front, the artist places his own face (see photo above). “This overlooking look inverts the visual grammar proposed until then, deciphers the commissioner. This time, it’s him who looks at us, begging the question: who are we looking at in that way?“

Facing this masterful canvas, two scintillating and colorful paintings by William Adjôté Wilson, present on the day of the opening. This Tourangeau worked with a Haitian artist practicing the “drapo voodoo” technique, which came from West Africa in the holds of slave ships that crossed the Atlantic. “It is a traditional work of beads and sequins who comes from Benin“, he explains. You have to get closer and admire the incredible attention to detail that this work required.

William Adjét© Wilson creates a dialogue between the history of slaves, which he sometimes represents as a broken body, and the figure of the revolutionary Toussaint Louverture standing on his white horse at the foot of a rainbow. The artist makes the voodoo flag a standard of resistance against the expedition sent by Napoleon to Saint-Domingue in 1802 to reestablish slavery. “I wanted to recall that faced with the incredible violence produced by slavery, people revolted from the start in Africa as well as in the West Indies and the Americas, he confides. Unfortunately we only have a few names left because it is the winners who write history.”

Other artists present on the day of the opening, the Chevalme sisters who live and work in Saint-Denis. They have recreated within the exhibition a small bourgeois living room with tapestry, armchairs and decorative plates. The motifs are reminiscent of the famous toile de Jouy, this so-called Indian fabric born in the 18th century. Looking at it closer, we realize that they have replaced the bucolic drawings of the origins with violent scenes, inspired by photos linked to colonization.

“The idea was to recreate the link between this story, not as distant as we think, and the contemporary world that we inhabit and which still carries the echoes of this story, explains the most loquacious one. In the Western world, we are all sitting on this history and our comfort is directly linked to the exploitation of populations from elsewhere.”

The second part of the exhibition, presented by its scientific curator, Patrick Simon, socio-demographer at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED), looks at racism and discrimination in institutions. It draws in particular on the ongoing work of the European Undeterred project, coordinated by the University of Bordeaux. It analyzes the systemic discrimination experienced by young people aged 18 to 35 in six European cities. Different types of works (photos, videos, documentary It was seriously hot by Valérie Mréjen) are associated with high numerical panels grouped by themes: education, housing, police, sport, employment, health…

These data allow us to understand how, although rights are enshrined in law, differences in treatment are perpetuated: unequal educational guidance, refusal of housing, discrimination at the time of hiring or access to care, facial identity checks, etc.

The figures shed light on the underground, invisible and sometimes unintentional institutional mechanisms at work.”We must be attentive to the heavy structures of society, more difficult to capture than ordinary hate speech, but with very significant consequences.“, préconise Patrick Simon.

Here are some telling examples based on studies by INED, the Defender of Rights or the Undeterred project: 20% of children of immigrants from the Maghreb or Sub-Saharan Africa have experienced discrimination during their schooling in France, 65% of CAP students come from popular compared to 29% in general and technological sectors. According to data from SOS Racisme published in 2026, half of real estate agencies accept discriminatory requests from owners who do not want to rent or sell to foreigners or people believed to be of foreign origin.

These repeated situations can lead to self-censorship: 53% of young people perceived as “non-white” say they have not applied for offers corresponding to their skills, sadly convinced of not having “the look for the job”. It’s difficult to prove them wrong when we know that having a North African-sounding name reduces the chances of being contacted by a recruiter for an interview by a third (Source: Dares Analyzes n°67).

The third and final part of the exhibition offers a welcome opening: it is about imagining “other ways of being in the world, without racism or discrimination“. To change the situation, in a way. A superb gallery of portraits, Humanæ by Angélica Dass, opens this last space. To denounce the absurdity of classifications, this Brazilian artist and photographer undertook an inventory of human skin tones. Refusing the categories “white”, “black” and “yellow”, she associates each face with a colored background obtained from a sample taken from the nose of her model. A frontal, impactful work and a beautiful way of asserting that each individual is unique.

Other artists offer unexpected assemblages which, in the jargon of the exhibition, “invite us to think of the world as a web of relationships rather than as a sum of separate entities“. Original and surprising, Meschac Gaba’s two headdresses combine the braiding of Harlem hairdressers from West Africa with the buildings of Manhattan, Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral and the Montparnasse tower.

We also really liked the latest installation by Romuald Dumas Jandolo, inspired by his childhood in a circus troupe. The artist, who defines himself as a gypsy, catapults the idea of ​​a fixed and definitive identity through a set of heterogeneous and joyful objects made of earth collected during his travels.

“It’s an exhibition that looks at you and invites you to open your eyes“, concludes Farah Clémentine Dramani-Issifo. How can we inhabit this world together differently without erasing our differences? How can we combat our prejudices, our stereotypes and our more or less conscious fears? Questions to ponder at a time when racism occupies a prominent place in national debates.

Exhibition “At the origins. Crossed perspectives on racism and discrimination”, from June 5 to August 23, 2026 at National Museum of the History of Immigration. Open Tuesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and weekends from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Full price 14 euros, reduced price 9 euros.