Palais de Tokyo presents Sonia Gomes's textile-based survey of memory and resistance

PARIS.- Sonia Gomes approaches textiles as vectors of memory and history, transforming them into quasi-organic sculptures. Drawing on her Afro-Brazilian heritage, she weaves sensory narratives at once intimate and collective.

This exhibition offers a sensory journey through the universe of Sonia Gomes, where the intimate, the collective and the sacred are woven together. Through found or gifted textiles as well as rope, embroidery, fragments of wood or other recycled objects, she composes sculptures, paintings and installations which unfold into space stories of transmission and transformation.

Knotted, plaited, assembled or embroidered, the materials bear the traces of their past lives and become vectors of sensory memory. Suspended, hung on the wall or placed on the floor, these works resemble living organisms whose forms seem to unfold and metamorphose as they encounter other materials, textures and colours. Each assemblage gives form to shared histories and reveals the invisible links that unite beings across the ages.

By reactivating skills and practices from Afro-descendant traditions, Sonia Gomes confers a dimension of symbolic reparation upon her work. At the intersection of the personal and the political, her oeuvre questions the heritage of colonisation, dynamics of race and gender, and mechanisms of cultural transmission. The colour red recurs across her formal vocabulary and is similarly threaded through this exhibition, making matter into a language and each work into a space where resistance and reinvention can come together.

Curator: Daria de Beauvais, assisted by Octavienne Denancy and Inès Fodil

Sonia Gomes was born in 1948 in Caetanópolis (Brazil), she lives and works in São Paulo. After having worked as a lawyer, she began to make art in her forties. Using textiles that she assembles, knots, twists and transforms, she develops a unique sculptural practice. A major figure on the international contemporary art scene, she is represented by Mendes Wood DM (São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York) and Pace (New York, Los Angeles, London, Geneva, Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo).

Her recent solo exhibitions include “Barocco, mesmo” (Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2025); “Raio de sol” (Louvre-Lens, 2025) ; “Torcer, amarrar e pender” (Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon, 2025); “Ó Abre Alas!” (Storm King Art Center, New York, 2025); “Sinfonia das cores” (Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2023). She has exhibited in numerous biennials, including São Paulo (2023), Liverpool (2019) and Venice (2015), as well as at the Pavillion of the Holy See at the Venice Biennial (2024).