NINA JAYASURIYA – ODYSSÉE DE YAKA VILLA
2025-12-22“All the images will disappear”
The opening lines of Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux’s novel, Les Années [The Years], appear like an acknowledgement but act like a warning. It reminds us that nothing is ensured, that images disintegrate, that memories become hazy and places undergo changes. What remains is not faithful to the past, it cannot be for the passage of time has made it cease to exist and transformed it into memory. The past is the persistence of an unstable matter that escapes our hold and which, however, we constantly try to take hold of.
It is from that primordial instability that Nina Jayasuriya built her exhibition “L’Odyssée de Yaka Villa”: an exploration of what happens when images are removed, of what is forgotten or remains, disappears or is transmitted. Yaka Villa existed once: it was the first name of the hotel set up in Sri Lanka by the artist’s father in the family home at the beginning of the 2000s.
Opposite – La chute des anges rebelles, 2025
Exhibition runs through to December 8th, 2025
Mennour
5, rue du Pont de Lodi
75006 Paris
France
