From June 17 to 22, 2025, the Galerie 20 in Paris' vibrant 18th arrondissement hosts Sparkling Love – L'étincelle d’amour, a dazzling exhibition by Tunisian artist Houda Ajili in collaboration with African-descendant artist Aswan Diama. The exhibition features nearly 20 colorful paintings of various sizes, showcasing a radiant blend of abstract and semi-abstract expression deeply rooted in Mediterranean cultural aesthetics.
Ajili, a seasoned visual artist, has presented her work across North Africa and Europe, including Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Italy, and France. Notably, she participated in the prestigious Salon d’Automne in Paris in 2014 and curated the first International Salon d’Automne in Tunisia the same year. Her contribution to the Tunisian arts scene also includes service on the State Art Purchasing Commission and a commitment to education and community, teaching visual arts and leading charitable painting workshops.
Her current body of work is distinguished by bold colors, intricate charcoal outlines, and wooden abstract figures that seem to exist in other dimensions. Each piece reflects Ajili’s personal journey—interweaving themes from her travels, cultural identity, and emotional landscape.
Sparkling Love is more than a title; it encapsulates the spirit of the exhibition—an emotional and chromatic celebration of creativity, identity, and artistic synergy between Ajili and Diama. This exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in a world where color, form, and cultural memory ignite the senses and stir the soul.

​From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, from Georg Baselitz to Ana Mendieta, from David Hammons to Marlene Dumas, from Arthur Jafa to Ali Cherri, some forty artists explore, through painting, sculpture, photography, video, and drawing, the links between body and mind.

"In the matrix-like curves of the Bourse de Commerce, echoing the circle of bodies inhabiting the vast painted panorama encircling the building's glass dome, the exhibition "Body and Soul" explores, through the works of some forty artists from the Pinault Collection, the pervasiveness of the body in contemporary thought. Freed from any mimetic shackles, the body, whether photographed, drawn, sculpted, filmed, or painted, constantly reinvents itself, giving art an essential organicity that allows it, like an umbilical cord, to take the pulse of the human body and soul."

Art captures energies, the vital flows of thought and inner life, to invite an engaged and humanist experience of otherness. Forms are transformed, reconnecting with figuration or breaking free from it to grasp, retain, and allow the soul and consciousness to surface. It is no longer a matter of embodying forms but of capturing forces and making visible what is buried, invisible, of illuminating shadows. In the Rotunda, Arthur Jafa's work, "Love is the Message, the Message is Death," transforms the space into a sounding board for the music and commitment of African-American icons such as Martin Luther King Jr., Jimi Hendrix, Barack Obama, and Beyoncé, giving them a universal reach.

In resonance with the exhibition, a rich musical program makes "Body and Soul" a polyphonic event. Emma Lavigne, Executive Director of the Collection, General Curator.

With: Georges Adéagbo / Terry Adkins / Gideon Appah / Diane & Allan Arbus / Michael Armitage / Richard Avedon / Georg Baselitz / Cecilia Bengolea / Constantin Brancusi / Miriam Cahn / Claude Cahun / Ali Cherri / Peter Doig / Marlene Dumas / Robert Frank / Latoya Ruby Frazier / Philip Guston / Anna Halprin & Seth Hill / David Hammons / Duane Hanson / Kudzanai‑Violet Hwami / Anne Imhof / Arthur Jafa / William Kentridge / Deana Lawson / Sherrie Levine / Kerry James Marshall / Ana Mendieta / Zanele Muholi / Senga Nengudi / Antonio Obá / Irving Penn / Man Ray / Robin Rhode / Auguste Rodin / Niki De Saint Phalle / Mira Schor / Lorna Simpson / Wolfgang Tillmans / Kara Walker / Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

General curator: Emma Lavigne, general director of the Collection, general curator