Sensible Season

Theaster Gates
Amalgam

Curator: Katell Jaffrès

For his first solo show in France, Theaster Gates has initiated a new project, pursuing the exploration of social histories of migration and inter-racial relations. He thus deals more exactly with questions of black subjugation and the resulting imperial sexual domination and racial mixing, while concentrating on an episode in American history. These themes allow Gates to explore new cinematographic, sculptural and musical futures while examining the history of land ownership and race relations in North Eastern, United States.

Angelica Mesiti
When Doing is Saying

Curator: Daria de Beauvais

Angelica Mesiti’s solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, the first in a French institution, is entitled Quand faire c’est dire (when doing is saying), a symbolic reversal of a performative utterance. Covering the 2012-2017 period, the exhibition highlights an iconic selection of Angelica Mesiti’s works, most of which having never been displayed in France. Deployed over a broader extent in the 1,000 sqm of the Galerie Seine, her video installations create an immersive journey, which becomes increasingly experimental during the visit, requiring each visitor’s active participation.

Julien Creuzet
“It’s strange, I must have been away too long, the faraway, my home, is in my dark dreams. It’s strange, with strangled words, while drowning. I screamed alone in the water, in a fever (…) such will be the title of Julien Creuzet’s show; or not”

Curator: Yoann Gourmel

The title of Julien Creuzet’s exhibition is the beginning of a poem, a first-person litany, of a voice that soon doubles up and multiplies. This exhibition will come alive in the form of secular pop songs. A deep-sea landscape in a plastic pool. An unaccentuated rhyme illuminated by a bluish light, turning around on itself. A parrot glitching with a guitar on its foot. A melodic meandering along jagged shores. An array of ragmen’s stalls at the Croix-de-Chavaux market. A breath and a riff. A choreographic score derived from a Dogon ceremony. Sirius B rotating to the beats of Afro-house. Caroline zié-loli, Papa Djab, Napoleon Bonaparte and Joséphine’s severed head. A cockpit  arena on Place de la République. Without forgetting  a hairless dog with iron-coloured pixelated flesh, both a wily spirit and a conveyer between worlds. Or not.

Louis-Cyprien Rials with Ramon Film Productions
On The Wakaliga Roadside

Sam Prize For Contemporary Art 2017

Curator: Adélaïde Blanc

Louis-Cyprien Rials is presenting at the Palais de Tokyo a film and a series of objects made with Ramon Film Productions. This production company, set up by Isaac Nabwana I.G.G., brings together Ugandans from various origins in a studio not far from the Wakaliga road, in a ghetto in the suburbs of Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Together, they have been writing and producing successful, low-budget films for over ten years. Their feature-length movies are inspired from Chinese Kungfu films and convey the violence of American action movies.

Julius von Bismarck
Die Mimik Der Tethys

Curator: Anna Morettini & Daria de Beauvais

Inspired by the figure of Tethys—a sea goddess in Greek mythology, the daughter of the sky (Ouranos) and of the earth (Gaia)—Julius von Bismarck has conceived the original project Die Mimik der Tethys (the expressions of Tethys), for which he has moved the oceans. That is at least the sensation produced by the presence of a buoy hung over the Palais de Tokyo’s Palier d’honneur, corroded by sea salt and covered by dry seaweed. In perpetual motion, the buoy reproduces the movements of its original setting, off the Atlantic coast. It is in this way that the visitors find themselves metaphorically under the ocean, and can directly perceive the sway of its waves, which can be either gentle, or wild.

Franck Scurti
More is Less

Curator: Claire Moulène 

With this original project, Franck Scurti is extending his stroll through art history and the signs of daily life. After approaching the social and economic crisis in a series of sculptures alluding to Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters (2018), creating a remake with scraps from Edvard Munch’s famous Scream (Le Cri, 2011), the artist is here going back over Paul Gauguin’s Yellow Christ. The interest that Franck Scurti has for such figures is that, in their time, they set out to replace the cold positivism of impressionism by a new humanism. This is a transition that the artist finds to be salutary and active in the current world.