Diversity is at the heart of the Palais de Tokyo's six new exhibitions. The diversity of artistic forms (from performance to film, painting, drawing, installations and graffiti) as much as that of identities: identities that we invent for ourselves, that we sometimes have to build with or against others. From October 19, 2023 to January 7, 2024.
Diversity is at the heart of the Palais de Tokyo's autumn season. Diversity of artistic forms, as much as diversity of identities. It is from this angle that the editorial below, written by Guillaume Désanges, invites us to discover the exhibitions for Autumn 2023.
It is increasingly important for artists to state the place from which they speak, to situate their narrative, and from where the construction of their identity begins. Lili Reynaud-Dewar takes a closer look at the artist's identity and, based on interviews with others, paints an uninhibited societal portrait of lives that are possible and livable today.
Lili Reynaud-Dewar dances, teaches, writes, speaks, investigates, works with friends, family and students. At the Palais de Tokyo, she examines the function of the artist, an activity with blurred contours, both privileged and precarious, between the exposure of private life and the subjectivization of public life.
His exhibition is divided into two parts. The first, open to the public, features the 19 episodes of a comedy between fiction and documentary: Gruppo Petrolio. Produced collectively and inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's book Pétrole, this film evokes the evils of the oil industry, technological progress and gentrification, and questions the value of artistic production in the face of political activism.
The second exhibition reads like a diary - Lili Reynaud-Dewar's diary - and, through a new body of work, gives an account of what happened inside and outside the Palais de Tokyo (in hotel rooms in Paris, in her emotional and professional relationships, in national and international current affairs) during the interval between the first intuitions and the final result, i.e. the exhibition.
In the tork of Ashley Hans Scheirl and Jakob Lena Knebl is the notion of identity transformation and plasticity.
Jakob Lena Knebl & Ashley Hans Scheirl. Courtesy of the artists. Photo credit: Georg Petermichl
Jakob Lena Knebl and Ashley Hans Scheirl's exhibition takes the form of diverse installations, islands of light that invite the public to explore "spaces of desire", in the words of the artists. They create an immersive atmosphere, with carpeting and mirrors through which visitors become part of the exhibition. The scenography draws on codes from art, design, literature and socio-cultural phenomena, while tending towards the humorous and grotesque. The installations amalgamate values, generating a series of tensions and affects that lend the most recognizable of their sources of inspiration a "disturbing strangeness" that is both unsettling and intriguing.
Rakajoo, for its part, traces the changes that identity can undergo as a consequence of an excluding or shifting context, a context that many of the artists featured in " The termite bite "They're trying to make it their own, by putting their own stamp on it.
It's gender fluidity that lies at the heart of " Out of the night of standards (out of enormous boredom) "a group exhibition conceived and produced by in situ "by artists from the "Friche", who spent several months working in the institution, while the nomad tent of Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, with motifs inspired by cave paintings showing humanity in symbiosis with its environment, weaves together disparate identities and narratives, highlighting what connects us to others and to the world as a utopia to be pursued.
The Palais de Tokyo is no stranger to plasticity. Proof of this is the transformation that has been taking place for several months in what we now call "The Zonethe space through which you entered the building. Inspired by permaculture, which proposes a reasoned and diversified use of a territory, we have extended the free space, accessible to all, to make it a new public meeting and programming place. We've installed tables built from reused exhibition materials, where you can read the publications on offer, eat, work, daydream, chat or meet up. We are also inaugurating a new cafeteria, a "chamber of echoesto react to news from inside and outside the Palais, as well as the Hamoa new space dedicated to inclusion, education and mediation through art, which will pay particular attention to welcoming psychic, mental and cognitive diversity, one of today's key issues.
Welcome and care will also be found in a new edition of the "Grand désenvoûtement", which invites artists to joyfully and subtly exorcise the ghosts that haunt this institution of multiple identities and narratives.
We hope you'll take as much pleasure and interest in strolling through the Palais de Tokyo's spaces and exhibitions as we did in designing and creating them with the artists.
Enjoy your visit, and hope you find your way around,
... that it will make you want to come back.
