La Triennale at the Palais de Tokyo

The first major event that marks the reopening of the Palais de Tokyo, La Triennale offers a panorama of contemporary art right at the intersection of global sites of production and the French art scene. Here are some of its highlights:

• The 3rd edition of the contemporary art triennial exhibition has moved from the nave of the Grand Palais into the open galleries of the Palais de Tokyo and other neighboring institutions along la Colline de Musées. Beginning within the interiors of the expanded and refurbished Palais de Tokyo, La Triennale is set in a series of overlapping cartographies that shift from small-scale collaborations with emerging research, production, exhibition, and performance spaces in Paris and the surrounding suburb, to explorations of the critical valences between the near and far, between the edges of France and countries adjacent to and bordering them.
  
• Through the concept of “Intense Proximity”, La Triennale investigates what it means to be active as an artist working today, in the context of a globalized and diverse French art scene. Inspired by the great work of early to mid 20th century French ethnography figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Griaule, it sets off on a journey to explore the nodes where art and ethnography converge in a renewal of fascination and estrangement.
  
• Fundamentally, the goal of the project is to shift from the idea of national space, as a constituted physical location, to a frontier space that constantly assumes new morphologies and new models of categorization (local, national, trans-national, geo-political, denational, pure, contaminated, etc.).
  
• Contemporary art has become a global phenomenon fostered by an ever growing network of relations overcoming distances. La Triennale therefore approaches the art of today through this wealth of connections. Its title, ‘Intense Proximity’, points to those frictions, those heterogeneous tensions which set every human activity into motion.
  
• It also questions how an individual’s origins, intellectual education or life path have an impact on his/her situation in the larger context of a society in which the fault lines are increasingly uncharted. It also asks how La Triennale can be constituted within the debates that currently animate French society.
  
• Set against the background of a globalization brimming with both hopes and fears as well as the looming shadow of cultural isolationism, artists from different origins and different fields, but all somehow sharing the cultural references which contemporary art provides, will address these tricky issues in their individual practice and alongside an expansive and robust guest program.