Six Continents or More

“Six continents or more,” the new season at the Palais de Tokyo, presents artists whose respective practices cross borders and boundaries, restoring agency to ideas, forms and cultures that are more nomadic than static. Amidst spaces of conflict past and present, these artists assert equality and exchange as vital principles.

Answering the calls for revolt and healing voiced by Ubuntu, a lucid dream, these six exhibitions enhance artistic expressions rising from a world where there is no such idea as a centre anymore. Yet this new perception of the world does not occlude history, quite the contrary: narratives of liberation and emancipation as well as violent stories of spoliation and forced displacements continue to dwell within diasporas.

Jonathan Jones explores new forms of reciprocity and restitution by engaging with specimens brought back to France from Australia by the Baudin expedition; Maxwell Alexandre claims the occupation of the art world’s sites of power; Aïda Bruyère and Jay Ramier evoke hybrid musical cultures as emancipating and shifting spaces of identities and representations. 

Finally, Sarah Maldoror’s cinema recounts decolonial struggles anchored in the daily realities of liberation movements through the voices of poets.

Beyond their singular forms of poetry, the artists composing this season share imaginaries that are not national but rather continental, and whose tectonic shift is irreversible.