In No Particular Order brings together a selection of more than 70 prints from three major projects of Magnum nominee Cristina de Middel. The first-floor gallery space of the Magnum gallery in Paris is dedicated to Christina de Middel’s series Party. In an attempt to build a documentary object that pushes the limits of images, Party presents a deliberately personal approach to contemporary Chinese society. Using censorship to erase the parts of the text from Chairman Mao Tse-tung that are no longer in use, the resulting pages become a script where the matching images build a series of diptychs that dynamically raise the question of the real nature of Communism in China.

The second-floor gallery space presents the Afronauts and Midnight at the Crossroadsseries. Afronauts is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in pictures. The artist starts from a real event that took place 50 years ago and rebuilds the documents, adapting them to her personal imagery. In 1964, still living the dream of recently gained independence, Zambia started a space program that would put the first African on the moon. But the financing never came, and one of the astronauts, a 16-year-old girl, got pregnant and had to quit. That is how the heroic initiative turned into an exoticized episode of African history, surrounded by wars, violence, and droughts. (Magnum press-release)