“City Prince/sses” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris

Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians…
As part of the original exhibition “City Prince/sses”, a good fifty artists will be exhibiting at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (France) from 21 June to 8 September 2019.

Without any geographical grouping, the artists of this brand new exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo are presented most of the time with new productions and in situ interventions.The exhibition “City Prince/sses” is presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed.

DHAKA, LAGOS, MANILA, MEXICO CITY and TEHRAN are expressions of a tissue of contradictions, as seen in their saturated traffic which coexists with digital networks which supposedly work fluidly.

Quite clearly, these megacities are very different from one another. Their cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.

Between skyscrapers and shacks, urgency and patience, megacities are undergoing a chaotic expansion, mingling transfers of capital with technological connexions in financial centres, generating urban margins with numerous inequalities.

This vast, disorderly movement transforms cities into ceaseless work sites, favouring imaginary deviations. The artists which then emerge are thus the flâneurs of the 21st century, the hackers of our responses to an urban environment which is often functional and standardized.

However, as visitors stroll through the exhibition aisles, they quickly realize that these megacities are not the subject of the “City Prince/sses” exhibition. They are in fact a context of research, a playground, where creators sample the multiple layers that constitute it to extract an excessive hybridization, in constant metamorphosis.

Raw and head-spinning hangings, mysterious landscapes, luminous or opaque zones, backrooms and traps: the presentation of the show has been conceptualised by the architect Olivier Goethals, according to the rhythms of day and night, from profusion to desaturation, alternating between monographic zones and terrains for encounters. He has elaborated an architectural pathway which reveals and accentuates the lines of force in the building, which is here being envisaged as an immense common area.

Guest artists : Aderemi Adegbite, Mehraneh Atashi, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Biquini Wax EPS, Britto Arts Trust, Chelsea Culprit, Ndidi Dike, Doktor Karayom, Ema Edosio, Kadara Enyeasi, Falz, Dex Fernandez, Dina Gadia, Betzabé García, David Griggs, Ha.Mü, Timmy Harn, La Havi, Amir Kamand, Hoda Kashiha, Lulu (Chris Sharp, Martin Soto Climent et leurs artistes), Tala Madani, Farrokh Mahdavi, Pow Martinez, Arash Nassiri, Leeroy New, Emeka Ogboh, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, Adeola Olagunju, Ashfika Rahman, Mahbubur Rahman, Fernando Palma Rodríguez, John Jayvee del Rosario & Maine Magno, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Reetu Sattar, Mamali Shafahi, Reza Shafahi, Justin Shoulder, Mohammad Shoyeb, Manuel Solano, Newsha Tavakolian, Stephen Tayo, Tercerunquinto, Timmy Harn, Traición, Wafflesncream, Maria Jeona Zoleta, Zombra

 

Curator: Hugo Vitrani
Associate curator: Fabien Danesi
Scenographer: Olivier Goethals

www.palaisdetokyo.com