DOCUMENT is thrilled to participate in Art Basel Paris 2025 with a presentation of photographs by Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949, Detroit, MI – d. 1990, New York, NY, USA) and Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, San Bernardino, CA, USA), alongside new sculptures by Julien Creuzet (b. 1986, Paris, France) and Faheem Majeed (b. 1976, Chicago, IL, USA).
A majority of the booth will feature an intergenerational dialogue between artists Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Both use photography to engage with queer bodies and the politics of representation, implicating the viewer as much as any figure who appears in the frame. Closely associated with New York City’s No Wave and downtown art scenes in the late 1970s and employing a rich array of photographic processes, DeSana drew on Surrealism in presenting bodies in confusing entanglement with everyday objects as well as one another. Anticipating the sexual anxieties of the imminent AIDS crisis, he infused queer erotics with equal parts absurdity and dread. Beginning his career in the mid-2000s, Sepuya’s work comes his intimate involvement and collaboration with queer communities on both U.S. coasts. The desiring gaze can only take in Sepuya’s bodies via fragmentation, mirroring or the clever reproduction of his previous photographs; effects meticulously produced by Sepuya in the studio rather than by any digital manipulation. Side by side, DeSana and Sepuya remind us that queer aesthetics—much like queer liberation—is a continual process, never far from the lived, corporeal world.
Julien Creuzet will present a new wall sculpture in cast bronze from a series of works first exhibited in the French Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
In his new series of wall sculptures, All of the Parts (2025), Faheem Majeed uses traditional wood‑carving techniques to replicate elements of African masks of unknown origin. Using pine, cedar, different wood stains, and shoe polish, each piece in the series isolates and reinterprets a segment of a traditional African mask—not to reconstruct the whole, but to sit with the fragments.
Works by Jimmy DeSana and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are included in the exhibition ECHO DELAY REVERB: American Art, Francophone Thought, curated by Naomi Beckwith, on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from October 22, 2025, through February 15, 2026.
