The Theatre of Exhibitions is a program at the Palais des Beaux-Arts entirely conceived, developed and implemented by students and curators of the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Ce n’est pas une menace, c’est une promesse, La Pelure du héros moderne, Points. et Répliques Japonisme 2021 are the new projects of Act 2 of the second season of the Exhibition Theater and are presented from December 9, 2021 to January 8, 2022.

A fanzine, clothing in all its states, works hidden behind QR codes, an embroidery workshop, a ping pong game with Japanese prints are some of the proposals that we will find in this new act.

These exhibitions, each in their own way, cross time by confronting heritage works from the collections with contemporary works by professors and students of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and other invited artists.

This joyful experimental laboratory puts into play the very principle of exhibition with forms still unspecified, sometimes confusing.

The Beaux-Arts de Paris would like to thank its partners for the Exhibition Theater and the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program: the Bredin Prat Endowment Fund for Contemporary Art, Altarea, Moët Henessy, the Friends of the Beaux-Arts de Paris Association and the Palais de Tokyo.

Practical information :

Opening on Wednesday, December 8, 2021 from 6 to 9 pm
Closing of the exhibition on December 25, 2021 and January 1, 2022 and closing on December 24 and 31 at 5 pm exceptionally.

According to the regulation in force since July 21, you will be asked to show a health pass or a proof of negative RT-PCR or antigenic test less than 72 hours old at the time of the control. Wearing a mask is mandatory.

Ce n'est pas une menace, c'est une promesse

In her work Open the Kimono, Lutz Bacher, an American artist working under a pseudonym, furiously gleans snippets of words from "television, commercials, movies, news, radio, novels, airplanes, subways, sidewalks and elevators. Thus isolated, these clichés sound like sentences or precepts, which haunt and at the same time liberate. It's not a threat, it's a promise; the ambiguity of the formula, of the negation that becomes affirmation and the possible reversibility of the terms contaminate the political speech as much as the speech of love.

A threat, a promise; this is the ambivalence that the proposal explores, wishing to embrace the plasticity of language and its possible twists. The academic and panoptic space of the Palais des Beaux-arts, which has been hosting the Theatre of Exhibitions for the past year, is adorned here with an almost domestic, yet elliptical, decor. Tumultuous voices are scattered and blurred, leaving the stage to close in on an eponymous publication.

Gathered around an affective community of student artists and graduates of the School, and inspirational figures of which Kathy Acker is a part, we also seek, by taking language as our main material, ways of saying and writing the non-precious, the grating, the discordant, the subverted: in her image, she who "loved to play with verbal matter, to build slums and mansions, to demolish banks and half-rotten buildings, and even buildings she herself had built, to turn them into never-seen, even unseen gems."

There are militant commitments which, through their tools, reveal the chilling contempt for the threats and false promises of political speech. Act Up-Paris' commitment is built with textual, discursive and graphic instruments, signs of a relentless struggle against governmental responses to the HIV/AIDS virus. The archives intermingled with the artists' contributions aim to make visible the presence of the association in the School, which remains unknown to students even though it maintains a strong link with the institution, since the latter has hosted its weekly meetings since 1994.

The presence of a collective library in the Palais des Beaux-Arts leads to a paradox - that of accessing intimacies, sometimes deviant, in a constrained institutional space. All the elements of this scene, from the contents of the edition to the furniture in presence, have value of clues. They tell, one by one, an alternative story, which holds less the latency of a threat than the announcements of a promise.

Based on a proposal by Lou Ferrand and Lila Torquéo, curators of the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program.

With contributions from Kathy Acker, Act Up-Paris, John D. Alamer, Carmen Alves, Arthur Dokhan, Gabriel Gauthier, Nastassia Kotava, Ultra F. Le Meme, Rafael Moreno and Emma Vallejo.

La pelure du héros moderne

Since the beginning of time, man has been confronted with the need to cover himself and to make objects, from the house to the clothes, intended to protect him, materially or symbolically.

In the XIXth century, with the effects of the Industrial Revolution, the bases and the modalities of this practice knew an important evolution. The industrialization upset the methods of production of these objects, whereas the emergence of the individuality with Romanticism, then the discovery of its complexity with the psychoanalysis, renewed their symbolic dimension. One also discovered, thanks to the development of the historical and archaeological sciences, their founding cultural character.

When Baudelaire sought in his famous account of the Salon of 1846 to seize what characterized the modernity, he conferred on the dress the determining role of "skin of the modern hero". This powerful formula, which gave its title to this exhibition, announces the importance that (re)clothing will acquire in the twentieth century in the renewal of artistic practices based on the exploration of the boundaries between the visual and living arts.

The exhibition brings together nearly a hundred works (drawings, prints, works, paintings, photographs) from the collection of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, where these issues became central with the establishment of a teaching of draping on the live model from 1864.

It also benefited from generous loans from Nadine Morlier (Galerie Le Cygne Rose, Paris) and works by Solène Rigou, Wan Lin Qin, Daniel Galicia, Sarah Abécassis, Marius Astruc, Léa Scheldeman, Manon Jacob and Victoire Marion-Monéger, graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Exhibition by Alice Thomine-Berrada, curator of paintings, sculptures and objects at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Anna Oarda and Daniel Galicia, students in the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program and Nadine Murgida.

"." (Points)

"." is a bi-event exhibition deployed on December 8, 2021 and January 6, 2022 from the embroidery manuals held in the collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Already in the pages, perforated in order to transfer the patterns and motifs, embroidery is manifested as a gesture. It is thus a question of representing it in choreographic terms. Thus we can broaden our apprehension of embroidery, and finally grasp the "." as a rhythm.

The "." is a time marker, it closes and restarts a sentence, it suspends when it is an organ. It presides phonetically over the "point" and the "fist".

The proposal is to concentrate the exhibition in two events, its opening and its closing. It will be closed in the meantime, so as to integrate into the very structure of the exhibition, the double temporal relationship of the gesture "embroidery", and thus to question the value of the event as discontinuity in continuity, point in the line or the drawing.

It is also necessary to consider the social and cultural history of this practice - the embroidery patterns were often preceded by instructions for young girls, so many patriarchal injunctions to the "female destiny".

The embroideries are celebrated here, by the presence and the habitus, in what they were able to generate thereafter of affirmation, relational and resistance. A device is articulated in the center of the pieces presented, a participative work around which the public is invited to mobilize and converse.

The exhibition shows the resurgence of these ancient gestures, with all their individual and collective memories, in the works of contemporary artists - the framework and starting point of a collective history - each piece posing as the outline of a direction, a note in the rhythm.

Exhibition developed and produced by Paul-Émile Bertonèche and Andreas Février with Daniel Galicia, students of the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" course, based on an idea by Alexandre Leducq, curator of manuscripts.

With the artists : Myriame El-Khawaga, Juliette Peres, Caroline Rambaud, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, Blancard Superstar & Loïs Szymczak.

With the scenographers and architects Romane Madede and Luna Villanueva.

Répliques japonisme 2021

In the theatrical sense, a replica is at once an appropriation, an actualization and a riposte. Seven invited artists will play the game of replication and bring their contemporary response to the masterpieces of the Japanese collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, adding a few tirades to the History of Japonism of which the School has been the theater.

Echoing a selection of 24 Japanese prints or accordion books chosen from the Tronquois collection of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Laury Denoyes, Morgane Ely, Alice Narcy, Adoka Niitsu, Mariia Silchenko, Lucile Soussan and Alžbětka Wolfová respond with a contemporary work.

Based on an idea by Clélia Zernik, professor at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, with Anne-Marie Garcia, curator, responsible for the collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Rym Ferroukhi, Pétronille Mallié and Soukaïna Jamai, scenographers, and Alice Narcy, curator of the "Artists & Exhibition Trades" program.