Continuing their contribution to the current exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination, members of the Parisian art collective Air Afrique join us to present a pair of film programs (with separate admission) intended as a dialogue between African and African American filmmakers, exploring their depictions of sociopolitical changes on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades following decolonization.

Air Afrique is a Parisian multidisciplinary creative collective founded in 2021 by Lamine Diaoune, Ahmadou-Bamba Thiam, Jeremy Konko and Djiby Kebe. It draws inspiration from the eponymous pan-African airline (1961–2002) and its heritage of cultural patronage, spanning across cinema production, music, and magazine publishing. Their practice includes an annual magazine dedicated to Afro-diasporic arts, conversations and aesthetics, design collaborations (Bottega Veneta, Louis Vuitton, Nike), exhibitions (Metropolitan Museum 2025, MoMA 2026) and a cinema club in Paris.

An Evening with Air Afrique, Part 1, begins at 4:00 p.m. with Mahama “Johnson” Traoré’s Réou-Takh (1972), which follows John, a young Black American visiting Dakar in search of an idealized Africa, only to find a Westernized country processing its new identity after independence. Réou-Takh is followed by Moustapha Alassane’s Retour d’un aventurier (Return of an Adventurer) (1966), which transposes Western genre codes to the Nigerien desert, offering playful postcolonial observations on cultural disorientation, fascination with the West, and tensions between imported modernity and local traditions.

An Evening with Air Afrique, Part 2, at 7:00 p.m., presents John Guillermin’s Shaft in Africa (1973), a blaxploitation classic in which New York detective John Shaft infiltrates a human trafficking ring exploiting African immigrants in France.

Together, these films extend Ideas of Africa’s focus on the photographic portrait as a vehicle for mid-20th-century Pan-African subjectivity, tracing the circulation of ideas across West and Central Africa in tandem with decolonial transformations and the burgeoning US Civil Rights movement. The screenings will be followed by a conversation with Air Afrique members, moderated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator in The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography.

Reou-Takh. 1972. Senegal. Directed by Mahama Johnson Traoré. 45 min.
Retour d’un aventurier (Return of an Adventurer). 1966. Senegal. Directed by Moustapha Alassane. 34 min.