Spring season 2024

The Palais de Tokyo in Paris presents a new season of exhibitions from February 16 to June 30, 2024.

The urgency of current events and the intensity of the present must not incapacitate us but rather encourage us to redouble our efforts to fulfil our goals, in particular that of amplifying alternative voices above the chaos. Together with artists, we must continue to create, invent, and explore. The social and political role of artistic creation, experiences of war and exile, questions of mental health, empathy and solidarity carried out in the exhibitions enter into resonance with contemporary world events. They constitute so many homages as to the power of art and its capacity to be with, against, besides, behind, below, and above the real… as well as in the thick of it.

Exhibitions

Signal, Mohamed Bourouissa
Curator: Hugo Vitrani

This first prospective retrospective in a national institution will offer an opportunity to discover the work of this artist from his most recent production to his very beginnings, alongside creations by artists to whom he is close and across jumps in time that eschew the norms of chronological order and exhaustivity. Since our world is, for Mohamed Bourouissa, a small one, the exhibition brings together several different geographies: from his home town of Blida, Algeria, where the psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon developed an analysis of mental alienation amidst colonial domination; Gennevilliers, where Bourouissa now lives and is active as a member of the local community; to the sky over Gaza.

With: Christelle Oyiri, Ibrahim Meïté Sikely, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Abdelmajid Mehdi, Collectif Hawaf, Lila

Dislocations
Curators: Daria de Beauvais and Marie-Laure Bernadac.

The Dislocations exhibition brings together fifteen artists from different generations and backgrounds (Afghanistan, France, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Myanmar, Palestine, Syria and Ukraine) whose work is marked or informed by the experience of exile, of being torn between here and there, between past and present. Their practices draw on ancestral know-how and contemporary technologies, humble gestures and poor materials. The aim is to pay homage to the vital necessity and intensity of artistic creation through fragmented narratives that combine displacement, imprisonment and war with resilience and reparation. This project is a collaboration between the Palais de Tokyo and the non-profit Portes ouvertes sur l’art, which promotes the work of artists in situations of exile, in a spirit of openness and research.

With: Majd Abdel Hamid, Rada Akbar, Bissane Al Charif, Ali Arkady, Cathryn Boch, Tirdad Hashemi, Fati Khademi, Sara Kontar, Nge Lay, Randa, Maddah, May Murad, Armineh Negahdari, Hadi Rahnaward, Maha Yammine, Misha Zavalniy

Past Disquiet
Curators: Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri

Past Disquiet is a documentary exhibition that retraces histories of political engagement and solidarity of artists and museums with the international anti-imperialist movement from the 1960s to 1980s.  The culmination of a research project begun in 2008 by curators and researchers Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti, the exhibition takes as its starting point the forgotten, transcontinental stories of “museums in exile” or “museums in solidarity”: often conceived as travelling exhibitions, they gave voice to artists’ support for the liberation struggles of various peoples, notably those in Palestine, Nicaragua, Chile and South Africa.

Toucher l’insensé (Approaching Unreason)
Curator: François Piron

Institutional psychotherapy is a psychiatric practice that began to be developed in the mid-20th century, and which centres on the conviction that if we are to care for the sick, we must first care for the hospital–that, in other words, we must never isolate mental disorders from their social and institutional contexts. Taking inspiration from these revolutionary psychiatric and human practices that draw on the collective and upon artistic creation, this exhibition explores different ways of transforming institutions into places of protection that can offer refuges from the violence of society.

With: Accroc, Carla Adra, Astéréotypie, Agathe Boulanger, Centre Familial De Jeunes, Michel FranÇois, Signe Frederiksen, Dora GarcÍa, Generativ Process, Tania Gheerbrant, Jules Lagrange, Boris Lehman & Club Antonin Artaud, François Pain, Patrik Pion, Abdeslam Ziou Ziou & Sofiane Byari