Palais de Tokyo invited Anne Imhof to realise an exhibition occupying all its spaces in the spring of 2021. This project continues a series of Cartes Blanches, beginning with Philippe Parreno in 2013 and followed by Tino Sehgal (2016), Camille Henrot (2017) and Tomàs Saraceno (2018) thereafter. Anne Imhof, whose international recognition includes the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, has exhibited at Palais de Tokyo as early as 2015 with DEAL, presented as part of the festival Do Disturb.


With this Carte Blanche, Palais de Tokyo wishes to highlight the amplour and protean character of her practice. For this first large-scale exhibition in France, she will combine performance, painting, music and installation works. From April, she will be stripping bare the spaces of Palais de Tokyo while inviting the public to a topographical experience, a spiral descent into the building’s entrails. Anne Imhof will thus open up new perspectives onto the spaces, but also onto her practice, placing it in a broader aesthetic and conceptual tradition, which connects it to other historical and contemporary artists. Her own works will be put into dialogue with pieces by guest artists which will punctuate the show.


For her Carte blanche, Anne Imhof will create effects of resonance and duplication amid an open architectural space, transformed into a vast sonic body and an inhabited labyrinth. She deconstructs the hierarchical systems it embodies so as to generate new images in which the live, visual arts, music and architecture merge.