PRESENTATION: Three Exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Part I

Palais de Tokyo in its autumn programs celebrates diversity in all its facets, whether in terms of artistic forms or cultural identities. For the occasion, visitors can explore a variety of artistic expressions, from performance art to painting, film, drawing, installations and even graffiti. The focus is on exploring individual and collective identities, and how they are constructed in an ever-changing world.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Dimitris Lempesis Archive

The SAM 2021 prize-winning artist Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, presents a solo exhibition entitled “Vaisseau infini”. The result of an artisanal collaboration in Tlemcen, this work of art is a monumental embroidery designed with the help of Algerian embroiderers, combining professional talent with amateur know-how. It takes the majestic form of a vast tent in the heart of the Palais, not only welcoming visitors but also serving as a platform for various events. The embroidered masterpiece draws its inspiration from the historical drawings of the Tassili N’Ajjer site, a rocky plateau in the Sahara desert of southern Algeria. These stone walls, engraved with stories dating back millennia, offer a unique insight into the evolution of mankind. They recount ancient peoples’ interactions with nature and wildlife, as well as their evolving perceptions of gender and sexuality. For Bouzar, these drawings embody a utopia, linking a distant past to an infinite future, transcending Algeria’s recent trials. The artist transforms this embroidered tent into a meditative and intimate space, conducive to attention and listening. Visitors are invited to immerse themselves in Vintage Arab podcasts designed by Hajer Ben Boubaker and a sound atmosphere imagined by Paloma Colombe. The exhibition transforms itself into a place of exchange, with speeches and accounts by various professionals, including philosophers and historians.

Through approaches that are parasitic, telescopic, fantasmatic, frictional, contradictory or simply based on friendship, the exhibition “Il morso delle termiti” attempts to undertake a re-reading of art history through the prism of graffiti. Here graffiti is neither a subject nor an aesthetic but rather an experience, an attitude, an imaginary, an underground current of thought : an experience of illegality and broken windows, the wanderings of bodies in movement, an attraction to murky perspectives, the romanticism of a kind of vandalism which is as much a form of care as of damage, and a fascination for visible and invisible languages that confront the precarious matter of the real and which shape themselves from it even as they transform it. In combination with the Lasco project, which for the past ten years has welcomed urban art in the secret spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, the exhibition provokes a fragmented, sometimes cryptic dialogue between fifty or so artists who are more or less recognized, or even not known at all. In an essay published in 1962, Manny Farber contrasts termite artists with white elephant artists. Termite artists express themselves in practices that are more difficult to grasp and manipulate. “Termite-style art, tapeworm, moss or fungus, has the peculiarity of progressing by attacking its own constraints, usually to leave in its wake only signs of devouring, industrious, and disordered activity.” Structurally conceived as an invisible city, in reference to Italo Calvino’s 1972 book, the exhibition is discovered in the same way as Tamara’s city in that book, by “streets bristling with signs that come out of the walls,” where “the eye does not see things but figures of things that signify other things.”
Participating Artists: Chaz Bojórquez, Aline Bouvy, A. One (Anthony Clark), Samuel Bosseur, Brassaï, Miriam Cahn, Sophie Calle, Pauline Charrière, COCO 144, Martha Cooper, Dado (Miodrag Durić), John Divola, Miho Dohi, Douceurxtrem, Douceurtarpinxtrem, Ida Ekblad, Mathias Enard, ENERI, Caley Feeney, FUTURA 2000, Richard Hambleton, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Antwan Horfee, Renaud Jerez, David L. Johnson, Margaret Kilgallen, Olivier Kosta-Théfaine, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lady Pink, Renée Levi, Sol LeWitt, Tala Madani, Mark Manders, Ari Marcopoulos, Matta, Gordon Matta-Clark, Julia Maura, MODE 2, Tania Mouraud, NOC 167, Nestor Nomakh, PHASE 2, Pö, Alexander Raczka, RAMMELLZEE, Jay Ramier, Leomi Sadler, SAEIO, Ataru Sato, SKKI©, Robert Smithson, SNAKE 1, STAY HIGH 149, Lisa Signorini, Hito Steyerl, Lily van der Stokker, Hervé Télémaque, Toni, VALIE EXPORT, Lawrence Weiner, Marion Widcoq, Martin Wong, Gérard Zlotykamien

The exhibition “Hors de la nuit des normes, hors de l’énorme ennui”, brings together twenty international artists from a queer and ecofeminist perspective. Through politically and socially engaged practices, the exhibition envisages plural visions of love and friendship, of romance and desire, of bodies and sexuality. It brings together twenty artists and collectives who start from the margins to reimagine in the present the composition of affects and conflicts, of interpersonal bonds and collective creation. Love is here apprehended not only as a subject but also as a work ethic and an act of resistance to the normative boundaries that narrow our ways of experiencing our feelings. Partly conceived and planned within “La Friche” during summer 2023 with a dozen artists and collectives, the exhibition is also the story of an original experiment within the Palais de Tokyo. Over the course of three months, artists and curators shared their critical references and their artistic practices with one another, in order to question the institution from within. How might an exhibition be inhabited and new relationships of complicity be imagined? How can love, tenderness, empathy and care be brought into our work relationships and practices? In this way, rather than producing an exhibition that seeks to define and delimit the contours of a social or political movement, this project cultivates its multiple expressions and its elusive nature. We have sought to not only work on love but with it: to create a loving exhibition as much as an exhibition on the question of love.
Participating Artists: Linga Acácio, Gloria Anzaldúa, Phoenix Atala, Jimmy Beauquesne, Cécile Bouffard, Lia D. Castro, chaos clay, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ndayé Kouagou, Kang Seung Lee, José Leonilson, Aurélien Potier, Jeanne Jacob, Tony Colombe. K, Rafael Moreno, Rafael RG, Agnès Varda, Myriam Ziehli, ana·mona servo / Les Éditions PanPan CulCul, MLF/Vanille/Fraise, groupe de lesbiennes politiques.

Photo Left: Dalila Dalléas Bouzar, Vaisseau infini, Installation view Palais de Tokyo, 2023-24, Photo: © & Courtesy Dimitris Lempesis. Photo Center & Right: Il morso delle termiti Installation view Palais de Tokyo, 2023-24, Photo: © & Courtesy Dimitris Lempesis

Info: Curators: Valentina d’Avenia and Clément Raveu ((Hors de la nuit des normes, hors de l’énorme ennui), Hugo Vitrani (Il morso delle termiti), Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France, Duration: 19/10/2023-7/1/2024, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri-Sun 12:00-22:00, Thu 12:00-00:00, https://palaisdetokyo.com/