Image: BACKSLASH, Paris
The exhibition opens on Saturday, October 17, 2026, with its presentation scheduled from October 17 through November 21, 2026.
Its title operates as both a visual and semantic declaration: by inserting the word ‘EYE’ at the heart of ‘birthright,’ it proclaims that the way each person sees is their most absolute inheritance. In this framing, vision is celebrated as an inalienable, intimate and sovereign birthright.
Through what the exhibition describes as a true creation narrative, the works bring contemporary figures into dialogue with African sculptural forms, elevating those ancestral objects to the status of companions and witnesses to the unfolding of Black futures.
The exhibition also claims the fundamental right to pleasure, rest and beauty for their own sake, presenting those conditions without a demand for justification or political resistance. It offers Black people an invitation to reclaim their own ways of seeing and to reinvent themselves, not through the eyes of others, but according to their own visions.
American artist Fahamu Pecou’s practice is described as having laid the foundations many years ago for an artistic manifesto in which painting asserts itself as a territory for deconstructing and reconfiguring dominant narratives surrounding Black identity. That account places the practice at the intersection of history, popular culture and contemporary imaginaries, linking its use of painting to the examination and reshaping of narratives about Black identity.
