On 12th and 13th April 2012, the newly renovated and extended Palais de Tokyo in Paris will re- open its doors to the public. Under the impetus of its new President, Jean de Loisy, the Palais de Tokyo is earning itself a place on the list of “must visit” destinations on the international contemporary art circuit.
Following ten months of renovation works by the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean- Philippe Vassal, who were also responsible for the design of the building’s first restoration in the late 1990s, the Palais de Tokyo now occupies the entire 22,000 m2 building (approx. 236,800 square feet), making it Europe’s largest contemporary art centre. Visitors will now have access to four floors of vast and extremely diverse exhibition galleries. The architects have deliberately preserved the diversity of the rooms in order to allow artists to work within a number of complex spaces. From the light-flooded upper gallery to the darker, more intimate spaces of the lower gallery, the four cinemas currently under renovation, and the broad open spaces of the curved platform in the lower concourse, the “new” Palais de Tokyo offers above all an astonishing architectural journey. The light and airy building stretches the length of museum hill, from the Avenue du Président Wilson to the Seine river below. Lacaton and Vassal have conceived the building as a landscape, restoring the existing light distribution and devising new ways of handling vertical circulation to create as flexible a layout as possible.
The new Palais de Tokyo takes visitors on a trip to the heart of 21st century art, in all its diversity, with a focus on bringing the french art scene face-to-face with its wider international context. The emphasis is on young as well as established artists whoseworks are accessible to different generations. The Palais de Tokyo presents many types of artistic expression, essentially the visual arts, design, music and fashion, and as always the newest, the most unsettling, most audacious and most intense of art forms.
The Palais de Tokyo is a living hub, “to experience the emergence of new behaviours, new forms, new languages and new beauties”. For Jean de Loisy, the Palais de Tokyo is “a place where we don’t work on art, but with art, and where art drives us”. The Palais de Tokyo wants art to be a personal adventure, so it places great emphasis on the provision of effective, unobtrusive interpretative resources. These resources must give the visitor confidence to form his/her own personal, subjective interpretation of works exhibited. More than a gallery, it is a center of activities where aesthetic experience extends to all other facilities: conferences, cinemas, performances, meeting spaces, educational areas, the bookshop (also extended), and two restaurants (the Tokyo Eat and a new establishment in the lower concourse).
On 12 and 13 April 2012, the Palais de Tokyo will open its doors for 28 hours of non- stop performances, concerts and installations. With the artists inhabiting the space, it will be the visitors’ turn to re- familiarise themselves with the building. Around 50 artists will take them behind-the- scenes of the Palais de Tokyo’s metamorphosis.
Visitors will discover installations inspired by the surrounding architecture, which will remain in place for over a year, setting the scene for a space where artists spanning several generations and their works will confidently settle in for the long term. Lesser-known and more established artists, including Jean-Michel Alberola, Peter Buggenhout, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Laurent Derobert, Vincent Ganivet, Christian Marclay and Julien Salaud, illustrate the diversity of inspiration and the broad spectrum of activities on offer at the institution.
Simultaneously, a new series of Modules - Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent will be inaugurated. A series of exhibitions presenting works by five rising artists who are making their first personal appearance at a major French institution. It marks a more advanced version of the
Modules, a breeding ground for new talent, which attracts attention from art world professionals and is part of the Palais de Tokyo history. This new, even more ambitious version of the Modules will offer visibility to more than 25 emerging artists each year, most with links to the French art scene. The first artists to exhibit will be Cécile Beau, Sarah Fauguet & David Cousinard, Zdenek Kosek, Benoît Pype and Maxime Rossi.
One week later, on 20th April, the Palais de Tokyo launches La Triennale, a contemporary art exhibition entitled “Intense Proximity” curated by Okwui Enwezor.
The Palais de Tokyo programme continues in September with a season based on the concept of “Détours de l’imaginaire” [Detours of the imaginary], the title of the first thematic exhibition conceived by Palais de Tokyo curator Julien Fronsacq. A new cycle of Modules and three monographic exhibitions will be presented, one of which will be dedicated to the French artist Fabrice Hyber, a key figure on the international art scene and winner of the Lion d’or award at the 1997 Venice Biennial. It will be his first time showing in a French institution in over a decade.
