The newly overhauled – spacious and luxurious - Palais de Tokyo is among the biggest exhibition spaces for contemporary art not only in France but in the entire Europe, claim the sprawling opening show ‘La Triennale’ organizers in Paris.
It covers close to 22,000 sq m (236,800 sq ft). French officials appear to believe that the third time is going to get lucky. The government mounted a show supposed to give the country’s contemporary a showplace at the Grand Palais that they couldn’t get on the international art market. However, the success it got was modest: The exhibit in 2009 did even worse.
Now for the latest edition, both the venue and name have been changed. The show is called the Triennale. And it’s not purely for lack of money, the organizers state, that the Palais de Tokyo, housing collection of modern art of France, now resembles an unpainted, unplastered shell. The circle of participants has been enlarged as well.
By entrusting the prestigious show to Nigerian-born U.S. curator Okwui Enwezor, also the Haus der Kunst director, the government has did away with its propaganda effort. The Triennale has a rather poetic subtitle, ‘Intense Proximity’, and it doesn’t focus on French art alone. Of the total 120 artists in the show, only just a quarter work in France or are French.
The exhibition is launched with a 1928 documentary by the French writer Andre Gide with his lover Marc Allegret about a voyage to the Congo. The show harps on the ethnological aspect of objects coming from the Third World, the opposite of what the Paris-based Musee du Quai Branly tries to do - wresting them from the anthropologists and presenting them as works of art. One also finds the usual mix of those deliberately artless videos, installations and photographs even as drawings and paintings take a back seat.
Many works on view carry a more or less palpable political subtext. The Triennale continues through August 26 at the Palais de Tokyo, 13 Avenue du President Wilson in Paris.
It covers close to 22,000 sq m (236,800 sq ft). French officials appear to believe that the third time is going to get lucky. The government mounted a show supposed to give the country’s contemporary a showplace at the Grand Palais that they couldn’t get on the international art market. However, the success it got was modest: The exhibit in 2009 did even worse.
Now for the latest edition, both the venue and name have been changed. The show is called the Triennale. And it’s not purely for lack of money, the organizers state, that the Palais de Tokyo, housing collection of modern art of France, now resembles an unpainted, unplastered shell. The circle of participants has been enlarged as well.
By entrusting the prestigious show to Nigerian-born U.S. curator Okwui Enwezor, also the Haus der Kunst director, the government has did away with its propaganda effort. The Triennale has a rather poetic subtitle, ‘Intense Proximity’, and it doesn’t focus on French art alone. Of the total 120 artists in the show, only just a quarter work in France or are French.
The exhibition is launched with a 1928 documentary by the French writer Andre Gide with his lover Marc Allegret about a voyage to the Congo. The show harps on the ethnological aspect of objects coming from the Third World, the opposite of what the Paris-based Musee du Quai Branly tries to do - wresting them from the anthropologists and presenting them as works of art. One also finds the usual mix of those deliberately artless videos, installations and photographs even as drawings and paintings take a back seat.
Many works on view carry a more or less palpable political subtext. The Triennale continues through August 26 at the Palais de Tokyo, 13 Avenue du President Wilson in Paris.
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