Palais de Tokyo Summer 2015

This summer, Palais de Tokyo exhibition spaces where fundamentally transformed with a huge installation 'Acquaalta' by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. French artist that at the same time represents France at the Venice biennale (9 May - 22 November 2015).

Acquaalta is the annual flood in the Venetian lagoon. In summer 2015, this same phenomenon took over the spaces of Palais de Tokyo. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot created a lakeside landscape which leads visitors into an experience, at once tactile, visual and auditory, which changes their perception of the space: “It is good to worry the visitor sometimes, to give him or herself a coded image. People love seeing themselves disappear.” (Céleste Boursier-Mougenot) As they move across this flooded space, visitors enters a stream of images which set the scene for an imaginary journey, a voyage through their own psyche.

Another impressive exhibition this summer is a first major exhibition with work of the artist Patrick Neu.
For 30 years, Patrick Neu has been developing his skill away from the limelight. With each work, he turns traditional technique on its head and embarks on new experiments which he continues for as long as necessary. He works with materials not often found in the world of art: bee wings, soot on glass, crystal, wax, Chinese ink sculpture, butterfly wings, shed snakeskin, eggshells, painting on ashes… “I turn materials and practices on their head. Crystal is, for me, simultaneously sharp, heavy, fragile and transparent (…) If I use it to make a warrior object, for example, this opens the way for questions …” (Patrick Neu)
The works selected for the exhibition are a nod to his perilous dialogue with the materials and world memory: Samurai armour in crystal and a straightjacket made from bee wings, specially created for the exhibition, a glass column blackened by smoke, birds feet cast in metal, dying iris watercolours, a dead Christ on carbonised paper, a recollection of Jérôme Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in smoke on glass… Patrick Neu’s work is epitome of a bubbling abstract Museum. He converses with the figures of Bosch, Holbein and Rubens and reproduces them in black smoke, guided by the properties of the material.

Tianzhuo Chen 
Palais de Tokyo presents the very first solo exhibition in France of Chinese young artist Tianzhuo Chen (born 1985, lives and works in Beijing, China), one of the most promising artists of his generation.
Tianzhuo Chen uses a colourful, grotesque and kitsch imagery, dominated by direct references to drugs, LGBT hip hop, the London rave scene, Japanese Butoh, voguing in New York and the fashion world, to forge an intimate connection between his works and the collapse of moral attitudes and beliefs we see around us.
Tianzhuo Chen’s characters may seem strangely familiar. This is because they are caricatures of our celebrity-filled daily lives. Everything a celebrity says or does becomes a new mythology and creates a new system of beliefs which fans follow blindly. For his solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Tianzhuo Chen is putting together a collection of hitherto unseen works, including a performance with artist and dancer Beio and the artist collective House of Drama from Paris.

Mixing painting, drawing, installation, video and performance, his works incorporate a number of religious symbols into iconographic elements borrowed from several urban subcultures which are shared by a global youth culture.

 Korakrit Arunanondchai 
"Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3" is the epilogue to a series of works created during the past four years, about the making of a painter. In the present world, where reality and fiction merge together to form diverse paradigms, Korakrit Arunanondchai develops his character: a Thai denim painter. His autobiography, his constructed image as an artist, the social realities of present-day Thailand, and the phenomenon of globalization are mixed together in the exhibition to form what the artist calls “a memory palace.”
Korakrit Arunanondchai looks to the Buddhist and Animist framework of Thailand, as well as to popular culture, geopolitics and technology, to question what it means to be an artist today, while celebrating connectivity, the merging of art and life, of fantasy and reality, of science and incorporeality.

Jesper Just
For his Palais de Tokyo solo exhibition, Jesper Just (born 1974, lives in New York) has created a new installation which combines multiple videos, music and a spatial intervention.

In his film work, Jesper Just links images of an exceptional quality to sound and music. The enigma disrupts the narrative, creating a tension that lets the poetry of the space emerge. Jesper Just does not provide a solution in his narrative, leaving the observer with his own questions and emotions.

In the lower gallery at Palais de Tokyo, Jesper Just created an audiovisual installation and a vast spatial intervention which transformed the existing space and the visitor’s journey. The film’s setting, the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center, becomes, as in much of Jesper Just’s work, a character itself, serving here as a phantom limb, indicative of absence and loss, but likewise a testament to resilience. Its presence, somehow inorganic, appears like a prosthetic limb within an altered skyline. The films follow two characters: a young girl who doesn't appear as an individual but embodies the ideals of youth and femininity conveyed by contemporary society, and a disabled child. Within the videos the characters mirror, oppose and interact, to explore themes of ableism, agency as well as the boundaries of body and selfhood.

John Giorno was a major figure on the New York underground scene of the 1960s and in the Beat Generation, a time when he developed his poetry based on the cut-up method and composed his first sound poems. As early as 1965, to make poetry accessible to everyone, he founded Giorno Poetry Systems, a label that has issued around 40 albums, and in 1968 introduced “Dial-a-poem”, a telephone poetry service offering audio poems.
Recognized as one of the most influential poets of his generation, John Giorno has constantly made his work spill over from the book. In the new areas of the Palais de Tokyo, he intervenes on the surfaces of the walls with a new chapter of his Poem Paintings, based on short fragments taken from his texts These short elliptical sentences are projected in large-sized letters on to the surface of a canvas or a wall to reaffirm their full expressive force, through an interplay of colors and shapes. The poem is taken off the page to be confronted with new contexts. In its turn this visual poetry, which makes the acidity of the word resonate by the use of strident colors, becomes pictorial space. The writing now becomes a drawing, and the word becomes an image.

http://www.palaisdetokyo.com

John Giorno

John Giorno

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Patrick Neu

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Korakrit Arunanondchai

Tianzhuo Chen

Tianzhuo Chen

Tianzhuo Chen

Tianzhuo Chen

Tianzhuo Chen