Autumn/winter program

Histories and Geographies of the Sensible
When several exhibitions take place alongside one another, no matter how diverse they are, secret and unconscious links are invariably forged—if only because the participating artists share common preoccupations with the burning issues facing the world today. This new season at the Palais de Tokyo is no exception.

Here, it is a question of the course of time and of the time of History, memory and oblivion, as well as the entanglements of these temporal phenomena with geography, an invisible but omnipresent motif this season.

In Cyprien Gaillard’s exhibition, it is the corrosive marks left by History on urban space amidst a faltering modernity that are subtly unveiled. The artist underscores the attention and care that we might bring to monuments, materials and motifs whose heroic narratives have slowly been sapped and damaged over time.

The leap from History to histories is a short one, and this movement is deftly carried out by Shéhérazade, la nuit, a group exhibition bringing together artists from all continents. Since any modification of the order of the world requires that we first change its imaginaries, the geographically situated tales told in this exhibition foreground other, less dominant, less triumphalist, less toxic narratives that nonetheless retain a critical charge and propose, through their resolute unrealism, multiple ways of thinking through the present and the future.

Through interventions in both the interior and the exterior spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, Guillaume Leblon invokes particular material histories alongside those of the building and the History of art more broadly. Entitled Parade, his exhibition is akin to a “great gallery of evolution” showing the changes in his sculptural practice over more than twenty years, from abstraction to figuration, from the natural to the artificial and from the archaic to the contemporary.

In the work of Minia Biabiany, the raw character of materials is charged—haunted, even—by questions of identity arising from the history of Guadeloupe and the Caribbean. The weight of this heritage is suggested by the interweaving of signs, stories and mediums. Hers is a reparative approach wherein vernacular signs are assembled in such a way as to thwart exoticizing tendencies.

Staying with the question of exoticism, we can turn to the work of Lívia Melzi, who for this exhibition has taken as her point of departure Oswald de Andrade’s “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” Towards the end of the 1920s, this text upended the scale of values by praising cannibalism as an exercise that generated hybridity through digestion and which implied a profound respect for the person devoured: a fruitful cruelty through which the Tupinambas could resist Western rationality.

This season also offers the chance to share the creative originality of friends from other cultural continents, including podcast pioneers Arte Radio, doctoral candidates from the SACre programme and students from the activist fashion school Casa93 in Montreuil.

Finally, to bring to a close the 20th anniversary year of the Palais de Tokyo, The Great Unbewitching, Chapter 1 explores the stories, the desires and the phantoms of the institution and its building. Playing freely on “institutional psychotherapy,” a practice which looks to psychically heal institutions as well as their occupants, creators from a range of disciplines will propose different ways of examining the Palais de Tokyo. This event will offer the opportunity to share with the public perspectives and analyses of the history, the functioning and the role of a contemporary cultural institution.

All of the histories and geographies of the sensible that make up this season are based, paradoxically, on forms of absence. Stories coalesce in fragments around objects, or remain hidden in the folds of materials and words, mobilizing our consciences and tapping into our affects.

Finally, I would like to express my immense gratitude to all of the artists who inspire us, to the teams of the Palais de Tokyo who accompany them, to the public and private partners who support us, to the friends who encourage us and to the public who drive us with their demanding points of view.

All the best, to all of you, for this season to come.

—Guillaume Désanges, President of the Palais de Tokyo.