KAN YA MA KAN

Kan Ya Ma KanExhibition by Johanna Tordjman

Kan ya ma kan…Once upon a time, in the breath of a memory, between two shores, between two times.

With Kan Ya Ma Kan, Johanna Tordjman draws from the stories passed down by her grandparents to reinvent a memory of North Africa, suspended between myth and reality. The Arabic expression, which traditionally opens folktales, “once upon a time,” becomes here the starting point of a pictorial and poetic journey through the traces of the past and the visions of the present.

Her works, paintings and sculptures, weave a dialogue between family histories and collective imaginaries. The faces, gestures, objects, and landscapes she evokes form a mosaic of fragmented memories, where tenderness, displacement, and transmission intertwine.

Rather than reconstructing a fixed past, Tordjman reimagines it: each canvas becomes a terrain of emotion and reconciliation, a space where memory is rewritten through matter, light, and color.Her contemporary gaze, imbued with both softness and strength, bridges the intimate and the universal, reminding us that the stories we inherit are also those we choose to tell anew.

Kan Ya Ma Kan is thus a suspended phrase, a tale that begins without ever closing.An homage to living memory, to spoken legacy, and to the enduring beauty of origins.