NıCOLETTı is delighted to present Infrazone, the first solo show by French-Lebanese artist Valentin Noujaïm in the UK, opening on Wednesday 19 November, 6–8 pm.

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, where the artist will launch his new publication, Interzone, which documents his first institutional solo show at Kunsthalle Basel (2025), accompanied by a screening of his La Défense trilogy on Friday, 21 November at 9 pm.

Please, click here to book tickets to the event at the ICA, London

Working primarily with moving image, Noujaïm’s work interrogates the dynamics of power – particularly racial – that shape contemporary societies. Born in France to Egyptian and Lebanese parents, the artist revisits colonial legacies through fictions that weave political histories with intimate family narratives, blending collective and personal memory to voice the muted revolts of marginalised communities.

At NıCOLETTı, Noujaïm will present his trilogy of films on La Défense – Europe’s largest urban megastructure, built in the 1960s as a symbol of modern France atop a former shantytown for Algerian workers. Recently screened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (September 2025), and shown in its entirety for the first time in the UK at the gallery, Noujaïm’s trilogy explores La Défense as both a psychic territory and a ruin-in-the-making: a theatre where buried dreams, corporate isolation, and urban paranoia expose the emotional cracks beneath the city’s surface and the decline of late capitalism.

In the main gallery space, Noujaïm will present a filmic installation centring on Demons to Diamonds (2025), the trilogy’s final chapter, which explores the eerie and frenetic energy of a towering labyrinth of steel and glass. Shot on gritty 16mm and interwoven with fragmented CCTV footage and surreal VFX, the film plunges into a decaying world where paranoia and dread linger in the air like an unspoken curse.

Emulating the atmosphere of an abandoned conference room, the installation will feature a series of silk-printed film stills on steel plates (all unique) – a new medium in Noujaïm’s practice, first shown in his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (2025). In this series of ‘Ghost Stills’, the artist captures spectral figures moving through haunting architectural structures and automated systems of surveillance, elevating individuals who exist outside the traditional narrative of heroism as symbols of survival in a society that offers them no recognition.

In the second room, the first two chapters of La Défense  trilogy will play alternately. In Pacific Club (2022), Noujaïm conveys stories of the eponymous night club that opened in 1979 and was the first nightclub for Arabs coming from the suburbs; a parallel world of dance, sweat, young loves, and one-night utopias. Reconstructing that story through the memories of Azedine Benabdelmoumene, 17 years old at the time, the film shares the forgotten story of this club and of this generation who dreamed of integrating into France but who soon came face to face with racism, AIDS, and heroin.

In To Exist Under Permanent Suspicion (2024), Noujaïm brings the camera inside the financial buildings, following Claire (played by Kayije Kagame), a businesswoman promoting a new skyscraper office in La Défense. Under constant surveillance, she finds herself trapped in a cycle of alienation, leading to a transformation from a a compliant office worker to a vengeful arsonist dreaming of setting the tower ablaze.

Infrazone will be accompanied by a text by Simon Gérard, who is also co-curating the exhibition with NıCOLETTı