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