Grace Ndiritu – The Blue Room, 2024

Working at the interface between activism and multidisciplinary creation — textile art, video, photography, collage, writing and painting — Grace Ndiritu’s art draws greatly on her personal experiences of living among alternative and spiritual groups in nature over many years. Grace Ndiritu uses various non-rational methodologies, such as shamanism, to develop critical and introspective tools for transforming society in order to improve the way people live together and to invent “new ways of seeing”. For over ten years, she has been creating a ‘masterwork’ entitled Healing The Museum, which takes the form of an ongoing series of large installations, performances and workshops. These public moments have enabled her to “reactivate the sacredness” of exhibition spaces, which she believes are among the last remaining communal public spaces that exist.

A museum within a museum, The Blue Room is conceived as both an architectural space for the critical presentation of collections and a spiritual space for encounters, transformation and healing. Reminiscent of both modernist exhibition structures and the traditional design of African adobe houses, Grace Ndiritu’s installation is an interdenominational and an intercultural environment. Drawing on ancient belief systems and the symbols of various communities, it celebrates the history of women through the ages, at the different symbolic stages of their lives - from birth to death. Classical figurines of Venus and nineteenth-century African fertility statues establish a forceful aesthetic dialogue with Grace Ndiritu’s textile work, Protest Carpet: Women’s Strike, which reprises an image from a historic demonstration by the Women’s Liberation Movement in Washington in 1970.

The Blue Room features around a hundred prehistoric, Roman, Egyptian, medieval, modern and contemporary pieces drawn from the collections in various Lyon museums – the Musée du Louvre, the Lugdunum Musée et théâtres romains, macLYON, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Musée des Confluences, the Musée des Hospices Civils de Lyon and the Musée des Tissus et des Arts décoratifs de Lyon. The museum pieces resonate with Grace Ndiritu’s own textile and video works. The artist urges us to set aside our preconceptions and prior knowledge, inviting us to create our own connections between the works and to make links based on our own intuitions, a suggestion that will lead to new ways of perceiving time and understanding forms.