"BEFORE THE STORM"
From February to September, from winter to autumn, the cycle of exhibitions "Before the storm", presented by the Pinault Collection, invites you to take a journey, from shadow to light, through installations and emblematic works for some, unpublished for others, of about fifteen artists, who seize all the spaces of the Bourse de Commerce.
Against the backdrop of climate change, in the urgency of the present, the artists in the exhibition invent unstable ecosystems depicting unprecedented seasons. Our frantic race for progress and abundance has irreparably transformed our environment. Its disruption forces us to adapt in return. Formerly the granary of Paris, the building of the Bourse de Commerce was from 1889 the witness and the actor of the globalized acceleration of predatory exchanges, resulting from colonization and the intensive exploitation of the planet's resources. In the architecture of iron, glass, stone and concrete of the Bourse de Commerce, which could just as well be that of a greenhouse, a series of fugitive and contradictory temporalities appear, including the landscape imagined by Danh Vo for the rotunda.
In the other spaces, a hanging from the Pinault Collection supports this birth of a round of changing seasons, changing ecosystems, micro-territories in the making, bathed in a light tending towards a mutating climatic twilight. Presage by Hicham Berrada, which immerses the visitor in a landscape in full transformation, makes us aware of the beauty of a world without us. Chernobyl by Diana Thater takes us into an irradiated landscape, an apocalyptic theatre, while Human Mask by Pierre Huyghe follows the movements of a monkey, wandering in what seems to be an abandoned town on the outskirts of Fukushima. waterfallby Robert Gober stages a trompe l'oeil nature from which we are irremediably separated, while the Untilled (pun between "untitled" and "uncultivated", "infertile"), still by Pierre Huyghe, restores the world as it is experienced by non-humans, from dogs to insects, within a compost committed to new possibilities of fertilizing the world.
With Lucas Arruda, these are tiny mental landscapes that make up a universe made of indistinctions, where the skies of pitch, toxic sfumati, give way to invented colors, difficult to discern. The paint is at the same time organic, chromatic and poisonous in the imprints that Thu Van Tran deposits on the surfaces of the white cubefrom rubber tree sails transformed into rubber by colonial exploitation in Amazonia and Asia since the end of the 19th century. In Anicka Yi's work, it is plant cocoons that give birth to robotic insects, blurring the boundary between the natural and the artificial, like Donna Haraway's cyborg, in whom all dualisms are canceled from modernity, to better embrace all the porosities between beings and identities: these mutations were already announced in the hybridizations of Alina Szapocznikow, where the human body mixes with the plant as with the object. Rooted in the ground, dependent on the wanderings of the sun, we share the condition of the plants, of all the living things that surround us.
The relational nature of our humanity is also expressed in the dialogue that Daniel Steegmann Mangrané engages with Cy Twombly: the American painter there described an unregulated cyclic race of time, where the solar boat merged with the image of an eye that opens to better close, and where the belief in the ancient gods mingle with the undulations of desire.
The Spanish artist nestles there by deploying a sum of fragile situations, simple stretched threads sheltering leaves and branches, luminous filaments responding to the fluctuations of the climate as well as to the presence of visitors.
Curators: Emma Lavigne, Managing Director, and Nicolas-Xavier Ferrand, Research Officer