MAC VAL

“Ici grand ouvert” (“Here Wide Open”)

GGC — 2026-04-17T09:56:26Z

“Ici grand ouvert” (“Here Wide Open”)

GGC — 2026-04-17T09:49:23Z

Chief curator: Nicolas Surlapierre
Exhibition curator: Frank Lamy, assisted by Julien Blanpied

An artist-researcher, SMITH (born 1985) navigates between photography, moving images, installation, sculpture and performance. His work develops in open cycles, often starting with photographs. Shrugging off chronology, he shifts the boundaries of portraiture and landscape, opening up a space where the human, animal, plant, mineral and celestial realms intertwine. His work is informed by a poetics of metamorphosis which overflows the realm of the real, traverses in-between spaces, and inhabits thresholds rather than certainties. Forms slide, identities shift, bodies transform, perception shifts gears. From fluctuating states of consciousness, between trance and psychedelia, SMITH weaves a network of correspondences between bodily and cognitive practices and experimental scientific and technological devices, in search of a point of contact where spirituality, sensitivity and technology can finally recompose together.

At MAC VAL, the artist's works have featured in the group shows “Lignes de vies – une exposition de légendes” (Lifelines – an Exhibition of Legends) in 2019 and “Histoires vraies” (“True Stories”) in 2023.

This exhibition has been designed in collaboration with architects and designers Matthieu Prat (Diplomates) and Sami Rintala, assisted by Toni Lozano. The monograph “Ici grand ouvert” brings together old and new works in a sweeping movement that reveals the artist's output in the light of his present and future inquiries.

Exhibition organised with the collaboration and support of Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris. With the support of Studio Superpartners

This project has been awarded the Bicentennial of Photography label by the Ministry of Culture and is part of the official Bicentennial program from September 1, 2026 to September 30, 2027.

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Expositions

« Ici grand ouvert », exposition de SMITH

Artiste chercheur né en 1985, SMITH navigue entre photographie, image animée, installation, sculpture et performance. Son travail s'organise en cycles ouverts, souvent amorcés par la photographie. Il y défait toute chronologie, déplace les frontières du portrait et du paysage et ouvre un espace où s'entrelacent les règnes humain, animal, végétal, minéral et céleste. Son œuvre est traversé par une poétique de la métamorphose, qui déborde le seul registre du réel, parcourt les espaces de l'entre deux, habite les seuils plutôt que les certitudes. Les formes glissent, les identités se (…)

‘L'Effet Vertigo'

Gilles — 2025-07-07T09:44:24Z

New hanging of works from the collection
Starting 24 October 2015

The Vertigo Effect
MAC VAL first opened in November 2005, so this year it is celebrating its tenth birthday: still young, but old enough to have a perspective over time, and to have put down roots in its territory.
For this birthday, the new exhibition of works from the collection explores artists' relation to history and its narratives, and our own relation as viewers to what went before us.
The gaze – what informs and constitutes it – is an essential element of this relation. The subject of the interpreter is therefore at the heart of the works and at the same time addresses the person who is looking, the beholder who makes any work of art exist.

The invention of the gaze
This new hanging, titled ‘L'Effet Vertigo' is guided by the artists' individual relations to history in a double, reverse movement which implies a concomitant closing-in and distancing. This filmic process was invented by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo in 1958, in order to suggest the dizziness felt by Scottie (James Stewart) on the famous stairs of the tower. It is designed to dramatize the subject by keeping them in the frame, so they don't go out of view, by means of a simultaneous forward and backward oscillation.
This can be taken as a metaphor for reading history in the present and for the stratagems and various attitudes adopted in its regard, from the distancing vital to visual focus to the displacements and changes of scenery that are sometimes needed to get closer to the subject.
“I was and remain persuaded that the role assigned to creators is out of proportion compared to the one allowed to viewers. There is a whole history of art that needs to be rewritten here.”
François Morellet.

With his customary insolence, François Morellet illumines this new hanging of the collection by questioning the notion of artistic genius and asserting the creative role of the interpreter. For it is the interpreter who gives and creates meaning, based on the narrative of the works. It is the beholder who adds, valorises, questions, and turns into music the story, notes, words, objects and time itself. Today, the museum is inviting visitors to question what constitutes their relation to the artwork and to history, what feeds and orients their gaze, this dimension of creativity, this space of thought that belongs to each one of us.

To this end, the exhibition sequence is deployed like a narrative in which the works embody and explore the questions of the gaze, the model, interpretation, reinterpretation, and revisiting. The artists brought together here reread, remake, replay or reinterpret historical facts, the use of materials, themes and subjects; they thus bring them into the light of a present that metamorphoses (them), either through the filter of their personal experience, or by sampling parts of this real past – objects, archives and stories – and projecting them into a universe that is other, a different situation, and towards a new meaning.
The hanging sets up a dialogue between works that relate the history of recent conflicts and explorations, episodes from scientific history, from the history of colonialism and decolonisation of which these artists are the products, that tell of traditions and rites, the history of objects, part of our own cultural history.

The point here is to consider, via these works, different ways of standing up to the authority of facts and questioning the status of narratives and myths by means of heroic postures or, on the contrary, with the insolence of modesty and personal experience, on the scale of 1:1.
This new exhibition of the collection no doubt constitutes the conclusion of a cycle begun somewhat chaotically and now finally synchronised. Thus, in 2010, the “Nevermore” hanging looked at memory and the past; in 2012, “Vivement demain” looked into a future that was by turns radiant and worried and disenchanted. Today, the point is to combine the two times and anchor ourselves in – and invent – the present.

Hot history
The present is engendered, then, between past and future, but this present is precariously balanced between the authority, doubt and certainty inherent in history and the hope and freshness that must be preserved and cultivated in order to invent the future. Perhaps this choice of works should be seen as a form of questioning, posing the questions that the museum is called upon to answer today, linked to the dangers and difficulties that we are all experiencing: the violence and cruelty of a turbulent world, the ravages of the barbarism that culture, conceived as a rampart, seems incapable of stemming, to the extent that it too seems endangered. From a less dramatic viewpoint, institutional reforms make the future uncertain. Certainly, to mention these issues is to “date” this introduction, but here, more than ever, history must be questioned from the place where the artist stands, from the time in which (s)he lives and works – in relation then, to both past history and to “hot history,” to quote the concept forged by Claude Lévi-Strauss: a history that is imagined and evaluated in the light of progress. Fénelon said that the “good” historian was of “no time and no country.” That illusion, if not principle, is shattered by reality, and probably by the inevitably subjective role of one who considers and studies their in vivo from the vantage point of their in situ.

The role of the interpreter – an air of truth
It is in this rereading that the missing part comes into play: the absence and silence, the emptiness that enable the reader, the viewer, the interpreter, to create their share of the score. History is seen as a composer's creation entrusted to a musician. Other fields and forms of expression connect with these themes of rereading and interpretation (execution): music, of course, the art of theatre, the archive, but also the restoration of artworks. For retouching, correcting, gaps and overpainting are at the heart of this hanging of the collection.
The restoration of artworks does effectively tend to offer the public a reading of a whole, of a body of work, of a sculpture, an object or a painting from which shards of matter are missing. Different techniques are used to, inpainting – a trattegio – to fill the gaps, and (even if they appear as such) allow an understanding of the artist's original intention.

Ever since its origins, art has beheld and represented history, idealising and reinventing and mythifying it, commenting on it. In the 20^th century, with the avant-gardes, history became physically present in the here and now via its traces, its documents and its archives.
History here takes on an air of reality, an air of truth, that is brandished like a banner, as proof, to celebrate the real, or to question and cast doubt on the story of the past.
Since the 1970s, and particularly since the 1980s, artists have questioned readings of history, using archives to spread the veil of doubt and to read it in the present. As the historian Sophie Wahnich points out, “In a logic of hot history, the ghosts of the past visit the present.” And these ghosts inhabit artworks.
Many of the work in “L'Effet Vertigo” partake of this resistance to the authority of official narratives, and even revisit and contradict the initial interpretation of certain events. Of course, this is all very far away from the Ministry of Truth set up to rewrite history in George Orwell's 1984. Today, though, the concern is to question its genesis and its manifestations, to remind ourselves that it is above all a creation and not a science, and that it therefore depends on the mentality of its age. A distance in time can allow us to make breaches, to question the vestiges of the past and the distortions of the present, to highlight optical illusions, to respond to time and its narrative.

So it's all a matter of interpretation
Here, history and personal stories are intermingled. It cannot be otherwise. Reparation, rereading, reuse and repurposing are all iterative actions whereby we can go back over the dissonance of time frames and conjugate them at last. The works presented here place us in a vertiginous position, in a present perturbed by the reinvention of the past, but also encourage us to resist the current fabrication of knowledge, at a time when data provided for the interpretation of the present are created and disseminated anarchically. Each one of us can be at once the maker, distributor and receiver of content, at one and the same time: the present of information, that of the fabrication of history.
This game with traces of the past, these doubts about its value, their necessary reintegration, the restoration of this fragmented “whole,” gives us the chance to connect with what we are living through today, to shed light on a current reality that is both worrying and thrilling, to take stock of what is at stake in our being and partaking of the present. It is an attempt to avert and unpick the presages of the past, to escape the identical, looped repetition of history.

Alexia Fabre
Head curator, MAC VAL

The exhibition “L'Effet Vertigo,” organised for the museum's tenth anniversary, is dedicated to Jacques Ripault, its architect, who died earlier this year.

« Sans réserve »

Gilles — 2025-07-07T09:43:49Z

Conceived around historic artworks from the museum collection as well as new acquisitions, this 8^th exhibition of the museum collection artworks revolves around the construction of narratives. Its aim is to have a look at the expressive power of artworks, at their ability to tell stories, to question and suggest. Quiet or talkative, discreet or immersive, sometime contemplative, artworks all have stories to tell. They spark emotions and reveal the fragility of situations while embarking us through reality, fiction or imagination.
The exhibition also reflects the collection history: a long journey punctuated by discoveries, intuitions, encounters and reunions, which, through time, led to the constitution.

Upcoming exhibition of the museum collection artworks from 30 June 2017
Opening on Thursday 29 June at 6:30 pm

Press release

With this new exhibition of the museum collection, we have decided to showcase and highlight artworks based on their expressive power and intention. Because they all express a certain narrative power and a more or less obvious desire to communicate. It is this ability, this calling, but sometimes also this discretion that we wish to investigate and prolong in different modes, now and in the future.

Artists invent stratagems, scenarios and schemes; they create places of projection, ellipses or silences in order for works to entice, open up or, on the contrary, keep their mystery- some of them being totally self-referential.

Talkative, explicit, specific, discreet, circumspect or outspoken, they convoke a mode of narration and expression that resonates differently in each of us. They tell stories. They are like invitations to go further and elaborate. They create an atmosphere. But they also suggest, evoke or, instead, hold on. Can artworks still suggest someplace else since the invention of modernity? Are there times when telling stories is overlooked and exhausted, and others when it becomes a necessity? Are there emergency situations that implicitly entice artists to speak up and bear witness, and are there more speakable ones than others? Is our time, in the broad sense of the term, one when artists are part of the world, or is the latter always, inevitably and relentlessly, the same?

Do some artworks only talk about themselves while others do not? The – obviously more complex- question revolves around the address and source of emission intersecting that of the receiver.

This new showcase of the collection entangles these possibilities of expression, retention and discretion of artworks, as much as it questions our own capacity to look, investigate and inquire in a passive or active way. Are we able and willing to complete artworks and project our own aspirations on them?

It is like a score made of very diverse pieces, from different time periods and expressive means, a polyphonic display in search of what art brings us and what we are able to receive.

In order to continue history and leave stories open, we frequently rethink this exhibition. It evolves in time, sparks new relationships between artworks and rewrites bits and pieces of narratives with for exemple the exhibition of Meiro Koizumi, artist in residency and the artists Groult/Mazéas as guests of museum collection.

Alexia Fabre, Chief curator

With works by

Kader Attia
Élisabeth Ballet
Hicham Berrada
Elina Brotherus
Claude Closky
Clément Cogitore
Zhao Duan
Sylvie Fanchon
Grout/Mazéas
Éric Hattan
Ann Veronica Janssens
Ange Leccia
Benoît Maire
Angelika Markul
Corinne Mercadier
Henri Michaux
Charlotte Moth
Jean-Luc Moulène
Marylène Negro
Jean-Christophe Norman
Cécile Paris
Dominique Petitgand
Françoise Pétrovitch
Franck Scurti
Tatiana Trouvé …

In the garden, find the works of:
Christian Boltanski, Mauricio Pezo and Sofia Von Ellrichshausen,
Eugène Dodeigne
Sara Favriau
Didier Marcel
Nøne Futbol Club
Alain Séchas

« Avec et sans peinture »

Gilles — 2025-07-07T09:42:29Z

- Previous Exhibitions

20 years of MAC VAL The museum where the future has already begun

GGC — 2025-03-06T15:15:13Z

The ideal genre

GGC — 2025-03-06T15:05:00Z

Exhibition of the 2025–2026 collection
From 21 March 2025
Commissioned by Nicolas Surlapierre
Co-curated by Yuan-Chih Cheng, Anaïs Linares, Margaut Segui and the teams at MAC VAL

20 years of MAC VAL
The museum where the future has already begun
Chronicle of an exhibition

20 years ago, the department of Val-de-Marne inaugurated its museum, the MAC VAL. This anniversary is an opportunity to confirm the quality of the museum's heritage, a unique collection that is the fruit of over forty years of remarkable, expertly judged acquisitions. It is also an opportunity to reaffirm the expression of a museum that has remade itself and is open to the future.
This new hanging devised by the curatorial team is the result of a wide-reaching process whereby the selection of works to be displayed to the public was conceived in an unprecedented, collegial way, involving all the museum teams. Their choices, debates and selections were put forward in open workshops full of passion, conviction, enjoyment and, finally, agreement. Visitors will have the pleasure of discovering or rediscovering emblematic works from the collection. The display is designed to evoke the memories, emotions and discoveries that we have shared over the twenty years years of MAC VAL's existence so far.

According to Nicolas Surlapierre
“Le genre idéal is therefore an open-door exhibition that brought together everyone at the museum who wanted to take part, who wanted to play with this parody of the heritage business. The participatory workshops made the porosity and instability of genre and subject hierarchies immediately perceptible [...] At a time of undeniable societal change, why should we hold on to classifications in art, and in the end who, among the artists, critics and visitors, really wants to hold on to them? Might it not be possible to find another way of classifying? Do we really believe in the principles of equivalence? In the end, isn't it really rather the desire to rediscover inviolable subjects which will of course be treated very differently that adds nuance to the supposedly iconoclastic nature of contemporary art?“

The ideal genre

The speciality of the MAC VAL collection is “contemporary art in France since the 1950s.” Over the years, it has acquired a unique, strong character conducive to encounters between major and emerging artists. Each of the regularly renewed hangings of this collection is an opportunity to rediscover these works from a fresh new perspective.
In 2025, to mark its twentieth anniversary, MAC VAL is planning a display devoted to the hierarchy of genres.
Such a notion was put forward by the art historian André Félibien in 1667 in the preface to his Conférences de l'Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture. He defined a classification that would govern academic painting and established the idea of noble genres and sub-genres in which subject matter took precedence over technical mastery.
Le genre idéal takes a mischievous look at each of the five genres in this hierarchy: still life, landscape, genre scene, portrait and history painting, restyled by this show as, respectively, property, horizons, actions, people and hours, as they become parodic participants in the great rhetorical adventure of art history and art education.

Property
Still life
Still life, a minor pictorial genre according to the theorist André Félibien, consists of the representation of inanimate objects, plants and animals. It conjures up a tension between the living and the inert, which is reflected in the terms of its name. While the English and German expression emphasises the idea of an “immobile life” [still life and Stillleben], the French nature morte, in use from the eighteenth century onwards, speaks of a “dead nature.” Here, “possessions” hold within themselves the ghosts of the past, questioning us about the conditions of our own loss. Taking a reflexive look at our consumer society, the artists confront us with the future of all organisms and the evolution of our environments and ecosystems. This section of the exhibition presents a genre that, over the centuries, has challenged us about the way we live and relate to things and living things.

Horizons
The landscape
Starting from the principle that a painting illustrates a single subject which defines it as a genre, André Félibien drew around landscape contours that limited it to the representation of nature alone. He did not consider the genre in the context of diversified and growing artistic creation. The works in this section reflect the diversity of artists' views of nature, as well as the new issues and constant changes associated with landscapes. All of these viewpoints differ according to the practice and sensibility of the artists, who perpetuate and reinterrogate the genre while at the same time enriching it. The sky, the cosmos, the sea, rocks, the garden, the island, the luxuriant or burnt-out forest are all part of this universe, multiplying its horizons. Discovering the works becomes a stroll punctuated by movements back and forth between landscapes painted, drawn, photographed, retouched, filmed, but also invented and literally built from scratch out of manufactured elements or natural residues, embodying the relationship between humans and their environment.

Everyday actions
Genre painting
This genre is concerned with the depiction of everyday, often anecdotal scenes. It is partly for this reason that genre painting, as it was known, was placed in the middle of the hierarchy, despite its popularity, which, in terms of taste alone, would certainly have placed it at the top. There is no heroism, no epic situations, just a new science of relationships.
In this section, the action is enough to signal the work of art; it is declarative. In its funny, evanescent, tragic or unconscious form, it is often the expression of a decision, that of artists who like to point out what will remain of most of our acts or decisions. Whether in painting, photography or installation, a good many of the works gathered here describe spaces that are strangely deserted. When did the world come to resemble an abandoned dance hall? When did we stop talking about genre scenes? No one really knows, because no one pays any attention to this terribly dated formulation any more. Only the actions still bear witness to these edifying scenes whose subject is now our attitudes.

People
The portrait
Is it anachronistic to talk about the “portrait” genre from the point of view of contemporary art – and sociologist Nathalie Heinich argues that this is already a genre in itself – insofar as, according to Pliny the Elder, the invention of the portrait was concurrent with that of painting itself?
Starting with the idea that the human being is the main subject of artistic creation, this section brings together tributes, faces and stories, expressed through the figure, alter ego and portrait of the other, which form the infinitely polysemous figure of “people” and designate an indefinite society. This indeterminacy also corresponds to an idea of art that, in perpetual metamorphosis, never ceases to define and de-define itself, as proposed by the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in L'Autre Portrait. He concludes that art's contemporaneity lies solely in its own questioning, its own wandering, and its “always uncertain and trembling” birth in “forms that would be appropriate to an ‘elusiveness' of all received properties.”

The hours
History painting
In his hierarchy Félibien considers “The Hours,” or history painting, to be the major genre. For a long time, and perhaps for some time to come, our relationship with history as it is being made and unmade has taken the form of TV news. There, historical, sociological and political events unfold, happily or less happily. This section is based on this model, because artists are good historians, especially when they play with the codes of history. For artists, history is a science of limbo, a science that seeks to rediscover all that is not quite lost, or all that has been lost along the way. As we go through this section, it becomes clear that there can be no historical science without a divinatory character, without the ability to read oracles in order to better understand the present by traversing the past.

Excerpt from the catalogue text by Nicolas Surlapierre

“This hanging is also intended to be a participatory exercise. As part of MAC VAL's twentieth birthday celebrations, this anniversary presentation was based on a simple premise: five categories, and over 2,700 works between us to be shared. Workshops were organised so that everyone could have their say as how this or that work related to still life, landscape, portrait, allegory or genre scenes. It was both a game and a lesson. Sometimes the proposals were surprising, because these categories, far from being fixed, were as fluid as they were porous, with one sliding from one to the other and being made up of one and the other, in unequal parts, forcing us to ask ourselves a simple question about representation: in the end, which subject dominates and on what conditions, if not at what price? Even if such a remark remains somewhat empirical, the workshop that posed the most difficulties was the one named after what Félibien called “history painting” or the “representation of history.” Today, in fact, the subject can no longer be assigned and limited to one medium. It seems significant that this genre which unquestionably reigned supreme despite artists' taste for landscape or still life is now the one that no longer fires the imagination, or even seems to mean anything to anyone. The hesitation could be explained by the constraint of having to draw on the collection, but the nature of the slight unease came from elsewhere: politics and the political have supplanted history. No one is sufficiently familiar with allegory, its reincarnations and its many avatars, to shift history onto one of its rhetorical dependencies. At which point, the theory of genres returned to first principles. The beauty of the exhibition arose from the strangeness of some of the proposals and the collusion, in the five sections, of artists who are very different from each other. Their juxtaposition will certainly create new meanings (perhaps even new subjects) or, in any case, ways of inscribing them not in accordance with historical logic but in accordance with a rhetorical tradition, to such an extent that they even acquire new functions.
Each of the sections therefore resembles an exquisite cadaver or, more precisely, must respond to the poetry of the non-sequitur and anachronism. It would have been unsatisfactory to keep [...] the old names, so the poetry of these fortuitous or chance encounters is reinforced by the play of words rather than by wordplay.
Still life has become possessions, landscape has become horizons, genre scenes have become actions, portraits have become people and the old history painting has become hours. Beyond the choice of words that each of the section openings will endeavour to describe, we felt it was important to opt for the plural, which allowed greater freedom [...].
It remained to mention the subtitle, which made a clear reference to a strange work by Georges Perec, Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien (...) Georges Roque's work, which is so necessary for understanding this new proposal, includes a fine quotation by Georges Perec from Penser/Classer. These two infinitives, which can sum up the work of a curator, are particularly effective in the context of presenting the permanent collections. The rather long quotation from Perec concludes: “(...) which must say something about the different roles of marked and unmarked terms in classifications and hierarchies.”

Publication
Le genre idéal. En principe, une tentative d'épuisement.
Catalogue of the exhibition of the collection for the 20^th anniversary of the MAC VAL.
Texts by Olivier Bonfait, Yuan-Chih Cheng, Anaïs Linares, Margaut Segui and Nicolas Surlapierre. 2025, MAC VAL editions, 248 pages, 260 reproductions, 17 x 21 cm, 15 euros.

With works of de Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Boris Achour, Etel Adnan, Roy Adzak, Dove Allouche, Pierre Ardouvin, Bianca Argimón, Arman, Étienne Armandon, François Arnal, Kader Attia, Bertille Bak, Gilles Barbier, Éric Baudart, Valérie Belin, Frédéric Benrath, Julien Berthier, Amélie Bertrand, Étienne Bossut, Halida Boughriet, Anne Brégeaut, Brognon Rollin, Elina Brotherus, Mark Brusse, Alain Bublex, Pierre Buraglio, Damien Cabanes, Ali Cherri, Claude Closky, Philippe Cognée, Pascale Consigny, Pascal Convert, François-Xavier Courrèges, Olivier Debré, Anne Deguelle, Benjamin Demeyere, Quentin Derouet, Daniel Dezeuze, Noël Dolla, François Dufrêne, Éric Duyckaerts, Erró, Sylvie Fanchon, Malachi Farrell, Philippe Favier, Valérie Favre, Clara Fontaine, Jakob Gautel, Ara Güler, Claire Hannicq, Laura Henno, Suzanne Husky, Neïla Czermark Ichti, Pierre Joseph, Valérie Jouve, Piotr Kowalski, Carlos Kusnir, Denis Laget, Laura Lamiel, Ange Leccia, Rainier Lericolais, Élodie Lesourd, Philippe Mayaux, Mathieu Mercier, Annette Messager, Olivier Millagou, Lahouari Mohammed Bakir, Jacques Monory, Roman Moriceau, Morvarid K, Jean-Luc Moulène, Netto, Jean-Christophe Norman, Antoinette Ohannessian, Vincent Olinet, ORLAN, Lucien Pelen, Laurent Pernot, Bruno Perramant, Françoise Pétrovitch, Éric Poitevin, Daniel Pommereulle, Présence Panchounette, Laure Prouvost, Enrique Ramírez, Judit Reigl, Germaine Richier, Gwen Rouvillois, Alain Séchas, Régis Sénèque, Bruno Serralongue, Société Réaliste, Daniel Spoerri, Peter Stämpfli, Nathalie Talec, Tsuneko Taniuchi, Barthélémy Toguo, Roland Topor, Patrick Tosani, Thu-Van Tran, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Vilmouth, Catherine Viollet, Hugh Weiss…

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Expositions

« Le genre idéal »

Il y a 20 ans, le MAC VAL ouvrait ses portes. L'anniversaire du musée représente l'occasion de confirmer la qualité d'un patrimoine, preuve d'une sédimentation experte et remarquable de plus de 40 ans d'acquisitions pour une collection unique. C'est aussi l'occasion de réaffirmer l'expression d'un musée renouvelé et ouvert sur l'avenir.

“Faits divers”

GGC — 2024-10-16T14:05:59Z

“Faits divers - Une hypothèse en 26 lettres, 5 équations et aucune réponse” is an exhibition held at MAC VAL from November 2024 to April 2025.

Curator: Nicolas Surlapierre
Associate curator: Vincent Lavoie
Coordinator Julien Blanpied, assisted by Marzia Ferri

Under the curatorship of director Nicolas Surlapierre and Vincent Lavoie, an art historian and professor at the Université du Québec in Montréal, the Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne has undertaken a major investigation into the subject of the fait-divers, resulting, this autumn, in a major exhibition bringing together no fewer than 80 artists from a wide range of backgrounds and formal practices. “Faits divers” has been awarded the “national interest” label, not only for the originality of its content, but also for the museum's strong commitment to reaching out to all kinds of audiences, from experienced viewers to newcomers. Visitors will be able to decipher the workings of the genre through an innovative scenography that provides interpretative keys to the many artistic proposals that explore the fait-divers. And as is suggested by the exhibition's subtitle, “A hypothesis in 26 letters, 5 equations and no answers,” here each visitor can give free rein to their imagination and personal judgement.
This group show marks the 20^th twentieth anniversary of the founding of MAC VAL, an event that will be celebrated throughout 2025. The inspiration for the theme came from Roland Barthes' essay “Structure of the Fait-Divers” (1964). Described by the semiologist as the “unorganised discard of news,” the fait-divers helps us to name and identify the aberrant causalities and coincidental relationships that disrupt everyday life. This exhibition offers a broad and comprehensive overview, allowing for comparison, and plays on the principles of enigma and trickery. The fait-divers is the revelation of the unfathomable mystery of banality. It is the grain of sand that causes dull routine to seize up, brutal anomie, the explosion of violence beneath still waters, the cruelty of good honest folk. It is also the revenge of the obscure, of the nobodies.

Leaflet

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Press release

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Text by the curators of the exhibition
Nicolas Surlapierre and Vincent Lavoie

Director Nicolas Surlapierre chose to share curating responsibilities with art historian Vincent Lavoie, a professor at the Université du Québec in Montréal. The catalogue published on this occasion features contributions by leading specialists in the field.

Despite real interest in the subject, no exhibition in France has really been devoted to an artistic analysis of the fait-divers. The exhibition “Faits divers” held at the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in 1982 looked at the subject through the prism of the press and ethnographic objects related to faits-divers. Similarly, the recent exhibition at the Musée de l'Image in Épinal showed how prints and press illustrations took up faits-divers, and were for many years the chief means of disseminating them. In the field of art, two exhibitions have shed light on the question. Régis Michel's La peinture comme crime at the Musée du Louvre in 2001, and Jean Clair's Crime et châtiment at the Musée d'Orsay in 2010, presented works of art (including 20^th century art), but their purview was limited to crime. The exhibition at MAC VAL, on the other hand, will offer a broader, more comprehensive panorama, with a comparative slant, and will play on the principles of enigma and trickery. After all, faits-divers are as much about stories as they are about worlds and imaginaries.

Without a doubt, Roland Barthes' “Structure of the Fait-Divers” 1964) was the inspiration for this exhibition.
Described by the semiologist as the “unorganised discard of news,” the fait-divers helps us to name and identify the aberrant causalities and coincidental relationships that disrupt everyday life. If, as Pierre Bourdieu famously put it, the fait-divers is a diversion, it is also one of the major manifestations of the society of entertainment. But while they may tell us nothing about reality, faits-divers do suggest its complexity and depth. The fait-divers is the revelation of the unfathomable mystery of banality. It is the grain of sand that causes dull routine to seize up, brutal anomie, the explosion of violence beneath still waters, the cruelty of good honest folk. It is also the revenge of the obscure, of the nobodies.

The fait-divers marks a break in the process of civilisation. It is aimed at a literate public, it requires a topical medium, in particular the press and media, and it is now updated on the new communication media, which themselves contribute to the plasticity of its structure and form. It holds a real fascination for artists, who have come up with all kinds of formal outlets and typologies. It can be cruel, funny, comical, ironic and cynical all at the same time. None of the major art movements of the 20^th and 21^st centuries have escaped the influence and shadow cast by the news item. The exhibition will showcase a wide range of artists working with diverse media and approaches. There will be no fewer than 80 of them, and over a hundred works will be on display.

Beyond the illustrative nature of the alphabetical guide, the fait-divers is also an excellent vehicle for questioning certain protocols and modus operandi in contemporary art. The “fictionalisation” of the so-called minor event, the resonance of the indexical model, the artistic transposition of investigative protocols: reconstitution, inventory and collection, the play of differing temporalities in representations of events, the ethics of testimony and evidentiary discourse, sensationalism and regimes of affect, and finally the effects of authenticity and clashes of opinion will all be evoked in each of the five equations that structure the exhibition.

Because the faits-divers is often linked to the world of investigation, to a certain form of enigma and to the desire of artists to elucidate the mysterious side of these events, the exhibition is built around the poetry of equations with several unknowns, which are conceived as a cross between parameters and a register of “indexicality.” Each of the equations will be introduced by “exhibits” of the kind presented in court, underpinning the legitimate metaphor of investigation and hinting at the miscarriage of justice or human error at the root of many faits-divers. The present exhibition is as much a universe of forms as it is a vast lexical field. The thematic guide, which refers to Didier Decoin's Dictionnaire amoureux du faits divers (Éditions Plon, 2022), aims to show the diversity of artists and forms that have taken a close interest in these singular events, with their indefinable and indecisive intimations. It will also highlight the impact of the visual culture of the faits-divers on contemporary art. In 26 letters and 5 equations, the exhibition will present a hypothesis of what a fait-divers is, but will be careful not to impose an answer. It will leave everyone free to make up their own minds, to have their own doubts, or simply to let themselves be carried away by the delights of fabrication and speculation.

A powerful catalyst for emotions (compassion, pleasure, curiosity, identification), the fait-divers has a fantasy value that plays a part in dramaturgy and contemporary art. The number and variety of these artistic practices encourages us to analyse the status of this subject in contemporary art. This exhibition examines the ways in which this protean category of narrative is transposed into contemporary art. The aim is not so much to examine the place occupied by faits-divers and events of a criminal nature in the history of art as to analyse their various occurrences in artistic creation from the 1960s to the present day. More fundamentally, the exhibition seeks to examine the links between contemporary art and the imaginary world of the news, which artists not only illustrate or document in their own way, but also reinvent.

In the mathematical sciences they are variables and correspond quite neatly with the world of enigmas to be solved. They sum up artists' desire to elucidate the enigmas that are sometimes or often subjacent to a fait-divers and transform the museum's temporary exhibition rooms into a vast board game, in reference to the famous game. Each equation brings together 5 or 6 letters from the alphabet. They break with alphabetical order, so that visitors can grasp the lexical field of “diversified facts,” the main themes, the diversity of responses proposed by the artists and the issues of reception. The equations describe broad categories or archetypes: “In the name of the law” (equation with one unknown), “Disaster scenario” (equation with two unknowns),”Doing violence” (equation with three unknowns), “Open your eyes” (equation with four unknowns), “The shadow of a doubt” (equation with five unknowns).

French site

Expositions

« Faits divers - Une hypothèse en 26 lettres, 5 équations et aucune réponse »

Du 15 novembre 2024 au 13 avril 2025.
C'est très certainement la lecture du texte de Roland Barthes Structure du fait divers (1964) qui est à l'origine de cette exposition. « Frère bâtard de l'information », selon le sémiologue, le fait divers nous aide à nommer et à identifier les causalités aberrantes et les relations de coïncidences qui viennent bouleverser le quotidien.

‘Human Autonome: Déroutes'

GGC — 2024-04-11T12:34:45Z

Opening on Thursday 25 April

An exhibition by Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer and Salim Santa Lucia.

With works by A.K. Burns, Alain Bublex, Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck & Media Farzin, Alexandra Bircken, Andrea Zittel, Anita Molinero, Antoine Nessi, Atelier Van Lieshout, Bill Owens, Blair Thurman, BP, Cady Noland, Delphine Reist, Diego Bianchi, Ed Ruscha, François Dufeil, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Hans Haacke, Hugo Vessiller-Fonfreide, Julie Hascoët, Kristina Solomoukha, Laurent Faulon, Lothar Baumgarten, Lucie Stahl, Malala Andrialavidrazana, Marcel Devillers, Mark Leckey, Mark Lombardi, Martha Rosler, Mathis Altmann, Matthew Angelo Harrisson, Michael Sailstorfer, Mohamed Bourouissa, Monira Al Qadiri, O. Winston Link, Peter Buggenhout, Piero Gilardi, Randa Maroufi, Sara Sadik, Serge Lhermitte, Sophie Ristelhueber, Stéphanie Cherpin, Suzanne Husky, Tania Mouraud, Taryn Simon, Thomas Bayrle, Thomas Teurlai, Tobias Zielony, Willy Ronis.

Exploratory and forward-looking, the programme of temporary exhibitions continues to focus on the processes by which contemporary identities and bodies are constructed, in an attempt to reflect on reality and, ultimately, to propose new scenarios and new ways of inhabiting the world. It is in this context that MAC VAL is hosting the fourth episode of the ‘Humain Autonome' touring project, curated by Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer and Salim Santa Lucia.
Car, crate, sleeper, tank, jalopy, banger, wheels – the automobile is a paradoxical object. While some adore it, others condemn it. It is, at the very least, an ambiguous symbol, the cause and symptom of many of the crises we are going through (economic, societal, climatic, philosophical). Facilitating the movement of bodies and goods, exploration but also conquest, an instrument both of freedom and control, its use has shaped landscapes, bodies and minds. As the focus of many economic issues, the car is a non-place, half-private and half-public, a fantasy machine and an object of fetishism, sometimes personified. Its production lines, its operating systems, its links with fossil fuels, its myths and its unconscious are all analysed, deconstructed, reassessed and turned upside down by the artists in the exhibition. However, the point is not outright rejection. On the contrary, it's about raising awareness and pointing out some of the aporias of our contemporary world.
The exhibition brings together some fifty artists from different generations, and is accompanied by a publication tracing the project in its entirety.

Since 2020, the ‘Humain Autonome' cycle of exhibitions has given rise to several events combining exhibitions, screenings, workshops and performances at the Frac Normandie in Caen (‘À 2000 tours minutes' and ‘Joyridin'') at La Condition Publique in Roubaix (‘Fossiles mécaniques') as part of the Art et Industrie Triennale in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou and the CNAP-Centre National des Arts Plastiques, and at the Ateliers Le Wonder (‘Prélude') in Clichy (92) for La Nuit Blanche.
Today, then, ‘Déroutes' at MAC VAL is the fourth chapter of the ‘Humain Autonome' project.

General Curator Nicolas Surlapierre
Curated by Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer and Salim Santa Lucia
Associate curator Frank Lamy

In conjunction with this exhibition, ‘Humain Autonome : Accrochage' presents a selection of works from the MAC VAL collection by Carole Benzaken, Élisabeth Ballet, Éric Dubuc, Éric Hattan, ERRÓ, Étienne Bossut, Jean Dewasne, Michel de Broin, NØNE FUTBOL CLUB, Peter Klasen, Peter Stämpfli, Pierre Ardouvin, Pierre Buraglio, Raymond Hains and Véronique Boudier.

Text from the curators of the exhibition

Marianne Derrien, Sarah Ihler-Meyer and Salim Santa Lucia

An autonomous subject, freed from its physical limits, driven by inexorable progress, becoming master and possessor of nature: this is the myth of which the car is the symbol. In other words, an epic, individualistic and ‘Petromasculinist”' (according to Cara New Dagget) narrative – one that supports the modes of production, relationships of domination and exploitation that are at the root of the destruction of our ecosystems.

This the modern heritage addressed by ‘Humain Autonome: Déroutes,' an exhibition which juxtaposes the imaginaries and the realities of the civilisation of the car. The car is an object of fetishism, and here it is reinscribed in the systems of energy, the organisation of work, geopolitical issues, the eroticism and the counter-cultures that it implies – those of ‘fossil capital', according to Andreas Malm, which is constantly renewing itself.

The artists in this exhibition, from different generations and from both the French and international scenes, are concerned with a different conception of human autonomy: understood not as independence from any exteriority, but as the capacity to reflect on our own determinations and interdependencies. An autonomy situated in relation to a social and symbolic order that needs to be deconstructed.

Opening the way to other horizons, other points of escape, their works become tactics of bifurcation and deviation in the effort to overturn and redefine dominant economic logics and value systems: the exploitation of bodies and land, overproduction, extractivism, colonial conquests, speed, power, progress, etc.

Made up of tens of thousands of parts, a car is at once a world in itself, an everyday object and a 20^th-century icon of technical progress. While the car owes its development to an initial promise - that of being able to travel faster and further, offering unprecedented individual autonomy - the aim here is to look at the emancipations and enslavements produced by the culture of the motor.

Setting out alternative narratives, the exhibition generates open and sometimes paradoxical proposals.

Leaflet

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Biographies

Marianne Derrien
Marianne Derrien is an independent curator, art critic and teacher, and a member of C-E-A and AICA France. After working as a project manager for exhibitions at the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Medici, she now works as a guest curator with museums and independent venues in France and abroad. Since 2020, she has been in curatorial residence at Wonder, an artist-run space in the Paris region. In 2023, she co-founded the curatorial platform FluidLabor, an independent production structure.

Sarah Ihler-Meyer
Sarah Ihler-Meyer is an art critic (France Culture), independent curator (Mudam Luxembourg, Ateliers Médicis, Southbank Center, etc.) and lecturer in art theory at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis. A member of C-E-A and AICA France, she is a regular contributor to specialist journals and collective works. Her curatorial work focuses on the legacy of Western modernity in contemporary art.

Salim Santa Lucia
Salim Santa Lucia is a photographer and artist. After an initial training as an industrial designer, he went on to work in a variety of fields related to the automotive industry, transport and innovation. His career has included stints as an industrial designer, a driver, a traffic controller and a press writer, all in parallel with his photography.
Documenting today's art and artists, he produces studio reports and portraits, as well as views of exhibitions and performances.
A collaborator with Le Wonder collective, since 2018 he has been building up a photographic archive that bears witness to the work and lives of the collective's artists in a fast-changing Greater Paris.

French site

Expositions

« Humain Autonome : Déroutes »

Du vendredi 26 avril au 22 septembre 2024.
Prospective et tournée vers l'avenir, la programmation des expositions temporaires se poursuit autour des processus de constructions des identités, des corps contemporains, tente de réfléchir le réel et, à terme, proposer de nouveaux scénarios, de nouvelles manières d'habiter le monde.

‘Matthieu Laurette: a retrospective as derive (1993-2023)'

GGC — 2023-10-26T12:40:41Z

General Curator Nicolas Surlapierre
Curated by Cédric Fauq
Coordination Julien Blanpied

The MAC VAL is welcoming Matthieu Laurette for a retrospective covering thirty years of artistic production and introducing a set of new works and interventions. Born in Val-de-Marne in 1970, Laurette is one of the leading figures of his generation. Winner of the Ricard prize in 2003, his work has been exhibited in major international institutions (Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Venice Biennale) and is held in numerous public and private collections. A protean artist, he uses the entertainment industry as raw material and the media (television, internet, press, etc.) as a means of producing and disseminating his work. Since 1993, he has been shifting the places where art is produced and exhibited in order to confront reality. Defining himself as a multimedia artist – his works take a variety of forms, from interventions on television and installations to recent developments on Instagram – he has developed a number of infiltration strategies at the intersection of conceptual art, popular culture, institutional critique, economic reflection and societal issues. Laurette uses existing mechanisms and contexts to create and insert his own works. He explores the complexity of the notion of value: of things, of the artist, of art and of money, even going so far as to make financial transactions the subject and material of his works. These call into question the place of art and the role of the artist in the age of the general spectacle.

Leaflet

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Press release

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Cédric Fauq, exhibition curator

This is Matthieu Laurette's first solo exhibition in a French museum, and an opportunity to look back at the work of this artist who has already exhibited at the museum on several occasions as part of collective projects. Five works from his I AM AN ARTIST series are also held in the museum's collection. Covering some thirty years of artistic production, ‘Matthieu Laurette: a retrospective as dérive (1993–2023)' brings together a range of different types of work (installations, videos, apparitions, interventions, sculptures, photographs, contracts, works on paper, etc.), while at the same time developing a number of dérives (drifts), in other words, ways of thwarting and diverting the codified exercise of the retrospective exhibition, approaching the retrospective itself as a produit dérivé (spin-off).

On 16 March 1993, the candidates in TF1's daily noon-time TV programme ‘Tournez manège', in which men and women met without – initially – seeing each other, included Matthieu Laurette, a 22-year-old student at the École des Beaux-arts in Grenoble. Presenter Évelyne Leclerc asked him what he wanted to be when he was older. Laurette's first answer was ‘artist', but when asked again, he specified ‘multimedia artist'. In 1993, this term had yet to be associated with computing but referred to artists working in several media. As the programme was recorded before it was broadcast, Laurette had time to make up invitations and send them out, inviting people he knew and people from the French art world (whom he didn't yet know) to watch him on TF1 at midday on 16 March. This was his first solo show. Laurette made the most of his television appearance and his statement. Around six million viewers watched this first Apparition.

This marked the beginning of a conceptual practice that would, in the years that followed, develop ideas about the exhibition as a medium and the spaces in which art is defined, and the modes of utterance that make it possible to call oneself an artist (between recognition by others and self-proclamation), in order to make the boundaries between the worlds of art (representation) and the real world (action) more porous. At the time, Laurette was already deeply influenced by Guy Debord's thinking, as articulated in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). He even used this book as material for several of his works. Rejecting the term ‘performance', he later described his practice as IRL Institutional Critique, adding to the name of this artistic modus operandi, the beginnings of which were identified as early as the late 1960s (institutional critique), the acronym of the expression ‘In Real Life', originally used by online communities to designate the ‘real world' (as opposed to the virtual world and fiction).

To make this IRL Institutional Critique possible, Laurette developed a set of modes of action and strategies: infiltration, appropriation, diversion, neutralisation. He used all the channels through which visual information circulates (print, television, internet, social networks, etc.), developing an aesthetic that feeds on advertising and the press (as Pop Art does), subverting the clinical and administrative coldness associated with conceptual art. In the 90s he produced a body of work around Produits Remboursés (Money-back Products): the idea was to turn the marketing operations (‘First purchase refunded'; ‘money back guarantee', etc.) used to sell consumer products in supermarkets back against themselves, in order to live ‘refunded' or, in other words, for free. Laurette used this action to create a buzz (as we would say nowadays): he appeared on television, on the cover of magazines, published a website, and toured several towns in France with his display truck and his Comment manger remboursé? talks to introduce people to this veritable way of life. From the Produits remboursés (Refunded Products) onwards, his work became intrinsically political, in both its communication methods and its content.

Laurette's work thus crystallised around three issues: the circulation of images, art and money. Soon he was being invited to take part in exhibitions in France and abroad, at such highly respected venues as the Guggenheim in New York (1998) and the ICA in London (1999), as well as major events such as the 49^th Venice Biennale in 2001 (curated by Harald Szeemann). In 2003 he was awarded the Ricard Foundation prize. This moment of institutional (and commercial) recognition led him to develop works that make the very condition of the artist (both geopolitical and economic) their content: Citizenship Project (1996 - ongoing); THINGS (Purchased with funds provided by) (2010–ongoing) and DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (2012–ongoing).

‘Matthieu Laurette: a retrospective as dérive (1993 - 2023)' was conceived not as a linear chronological narrative but, as its title suggests, a dérive, with all its multiple meanings [drift, derivation]. This drift is both spatial and temporal: in the upper reaches of the retrospective space, advertising posters show images of Laurette's exhibitions. Both souvenir photos and archives of the artist's practice, they serve to anchor the retrospective, seeking to resituate the contexts in which the artist operated and to which his works are intimately linked. Four works previously seen at the MAC VAL will be installed exactly where they were originally shown. These ‘remakes' sometimes conflict with the scenography of the exhibition preceding them (the contents of which have been retained for the retrospective), or even between different works. They are also an opportunity to invite other artists into the exhibition, neighbours who have previously exhibited Laurette's work in other venues. In this way, the retrospective is conceived not just as a retrospective of works but as a retrospective of exhibitions (in which the acts of linking the works of curators of projects that have included Laurette are replayed to differing degrees).

In 1999, invited by Christian Bernard for a solo exhibition at the MAMCO in Geneva, Laurette took over the window displays to show a series of prints on A4 paper, set up on display stands. Each A4 sheet represented a work by the artist that was ‘available for sale'. This was already a form of retrospective, and Laurette has continued to conceive works that function as indexes to his body of work, thinking about the ‘availability ‘of his pieces, their circulation, their absence, as well as their reproduction or transformation. The most recent example is MATTHIEU: Une rétrospective dérivée, 1993 - 2015, a collaboration between Matthieu Laurette and the graphic design studio Syndicat (Sasha Léopold and François Havegeer), presented in this exhibition. Other gestures in the retrospective as dérive, new works will also function as condensed retrospectives, pieces that will contain, conceptually, all of Laurette's work, conceived as Russian dolls. Another work (a sound piece) will highlight the absence of certain works, the ‘missing pieces' in the exhibition. Finally, DRINKS BY: THE BEER, WINE AND OTHER ALCOHOL ART ARCHIVE (1999–in progress), a work by Matthieu Laurette in the form of a collection and independent exhibition, will be shown in the museum's Salon area.

To coincide with and complement the exhibition ‘Matthieu Laurette: a retrospective as dérive (1993–2023)', MAC VAL is publishing Matthieu Laurette: a monograph as derive (1993 –2023), a 336-page bilingual edition designed by Syndicat. It contains a major archive documenting Matthieu Laurette's work, with essays by Julien Blanpied, Inès Champey, Dorothée Dupuis, Alex Farquharson, Cédric Fauq, Nicolas Surlapierre and numerous guests. The exhibition will also be the venue for a series of meetings, workshops, discussions and experiments aimed at a range of audiences, with a view to ensuring that the dérives keeping drifting on.

French site

Expositions

Matthieu Laurette : une rétrospective dérivée (1993-2023)

Exposition du 21 octobre 2023 au 3 mars 2024.
Le MAC VAL accueille Matthieu Laurette pour une exposition rétrospective qui présente 30 années de production artistique et inclut un ensemble de nouvelles œuvres et interventions.