A multidisciplinary programme

Guided by an insatiable curiosity for all the artistic and intellectual expression of its time, the Fondation Cartier has developed a distinctive approach to exhibitions that are both innovative and multidisciplinary. Its exhibitions have been conceived as spaces for encounters and dialogue between art, knowledge, and the diverse non-western cultures. Over the years, the Fondation Cartier has brought together a community of creators from all horizons — artists, philosophers, scientists, anthropologists, musicians, and performers — who, whether established, emerging, or yet to be discovered, have forged lasting relationships structured around continuous exchange

These relationships have made the Fondation Cartier’s program a platform for voices that enrich our understanding of the major issues that shape our contemporary world. By bringing together perspectives and disciplines, these encounters have enabled the creation of interdisciplinary works and exhibitions. Creation is one of the mandates of the Fondation Cartier that is then supported by the diffusion of this programming widely to audiences in France and around the world.

In doing so, the Fondation Cartier has explored in depth the artistic scenes of every continent. This international engagement has led it to develop a program of exhibitions and live performances that open up new forms of collaboration, establishing partnerships with leading international cultural institutions such as Triennale Milano, the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, and the Biennale of Sydney.

In its new Parisian building at 2, Place du Palais-Royal, its dynamic architecture and transparency offer new platforms that enable the expansion of Fondation Cartier’s institutional project. Thanks to its innovative dynamic design display, it continues to question and explore the many ways in which exhibitions can be conceived.

Since its opening in 1984, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has placed creation at the heart of its mission, offering both internationally renowned artists and emerging talents a space of freedom and encounter. It has invited artists, scientists, philosophers, architects, and creators from all disciplines to explore and challenge the codes of exhibition-making. Its glass and transparent building on boulevard Raspail offered artists and exhibition designers a radically new setting. The Fondation Cartier invited architects and filmmakers to stage exhibitions that acted as laboratories in display systems. With its international exhibition program — and now within its new Parisian building — the Fondation Cartier continues to pursue this reflection on exhibition architecture, making it a cornerstone of its cultural program that fully integrates exhibition space, audience mediation, performance and live art in a spirit of ongoing dialogue on the plurality of forms in contemporary museography.

It has collaborated with artists to present their first exhibitions in France — and, in some cases, in Europe — thereby contributing to the development of their practices and careers. Many of these artists are today internationally acclaimed, including Huang Yong Ping (from 1990), Matthew Barney (from 1995), Sarah Sze (from 1999), and Takashi Murakami (from 2002).

When presenting established artists such as Bruce Nauman (2015), Yue Minjun (L’Ombre du fou rire, 2012), Ron Mueck (2005, 2013, 2023), or Damien Hirst (Cherry Blossoms, 2021), the Fondation Cartier reveals new perspectives on their work while showcasing their most recent creations. As for the masters of their disciplines — filmmakers Agnès Varda (L’Île et Elle, 2006), David Lynch (The Air Is on Fire, 2007), and Takeshi Kitano (Gosse de Peintre, 2010), or musician Patti Smith (Land 250, 2008) — the Fondation encourages them to unveil lesser-known facets of their practices, beyond their usual fields of creation.

This long-term commitment is made possible by the Fondation Cartier’s sustained collaboration with many artists over the years — among them, photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon. Beyond the exhibitions dedicated to his work, the Fondation Cartier has partnered with Depardon on several projects that led him off the beaten path, supporting the production of films created for Yanomami, l’esprit de la forêt (2003), Terre Natale, Ailleurs commence ici (2008), Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere (2011), and The Great Animal Orchestra (2016).

By also engaging with expressions of popular culture — from rock’n’roll to graffiti and comic art — the Fondation Cartier continually broadens its field of curiosity, promoting curiosity, discovery and learning in its programming.

International in its outlook, the Fondation Cartier engages in dialogue with artists from all geographies. It was the first institution to present, as early as 1994, monographic exhibitions outside their home countries for the Malian photographers Seydou Keïta (1994) and Malick Sidibé (1995, 2017), as well as for Nigerian photographer J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere (2000). The Fondation Cartier also devoted major solo exhibitions to Congolese artists Bodys Isek Kingelez (1995) and Chéri Samba (J’aime Chéri Samba, 2004), and to the broader artistic scene of the country with Beauté Congo 1926–2015 in 2015.

Many Latin American artists have likewise been brought to prominence through solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier, including Argentinian artist Guillermo Kuitca (Recent Works, 2000); Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão (Echo Chamber, 2005); Colombian photographer Fernell Franco, whose first European retrospective (Cali Clair-Obscur, 2016) was held ten years after his passing; Mexican photographer Graciela Iturbide (Heliotropo 37, 2022); and Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, who featured among the seventy artists of Southern Geometries (2018) and to whom the Fondation Cartier dedicated, in 2024, the first major retrospective in Europe.

The Fondation Cartier is also deeply committed to showcasing the diversity and vitality of Indigenous languages and cultures. For over twenty years, it has been engaged with the Yanomami, one of the largest Indigenous peoples of the Brazilian Amazon, and with photographer Claudia Andujar, who since the early 1970s has devoted her life to documenting this community and defending their rights. Works by Yanomami artists such as Taniki, Joseca, Ehuana, and Kalepi, as well as by artists from the Nivaclé and Guaraní communities of the Paraguayan Chaco, have been exhibited by the Fondation Cartier and are now part of its Collection. Each of them bears witness to the essential connection between human beings and their environment.

For the Fondation Cartier, presenting the work of these Indigenous artists is important for the field of contemporary art today— it was among the pioneering institutions to affirm this conviction.

In the early 1990s, the Fondation Cartier began to break down boundaries between disciplines through thematic exhibitions that opened new fields of reflection. The Fondation Cartier brings together all realms of creation and thought, fostering unexpected encounters between artists and individuals from outside the art world. Scientists, philosophers, and creators are invited to collectively explore contemporary issues — among them philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018), anthropologist Bruce Albert, who has accompanied the Fondation Cartier’s curiosity since the exhibition Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest (2003), and French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour.

In its ongoing exploration of the state of the world, the Fondation Cartier has, for many years, placed ecological questions — particularly those concerning humanity’s relationship with nature — at the heart of its programming. Bringing together artists, thinkers, and scientists engaged in an aesthetic and existential quest deeply attuned to the enigmatic beauty of the living world, it offers profound reflections on the destruction of animal and plant life, deforestation, and climate change.

The Great Animal Orchestra, an immersive installation created in 2016 by Bernie Krause and the London-based collective United Visual Artists, presents a selection of the artist’s most remarkable recordings made in Africa, the Americas, and the depths of the oceans. These “soundscapes” reveal the diversity and complexity of animal vocalizations — increasingly silenced by human activity — materializing the extinction of species while immersing the visitor in a paradoxical aesthetic meditation. In 2022, the Fondation Cartier presented the installation in Australia for the 23rd Biennale of Sydney.

With Trees (Nous les Arbres, 2019), the Fondation Cartier brought together a community of artists, botanists, and philosophers to echo the latest scientific research on trees, revealing the beauty and biological richness of these great protagonists of the living world, now under severe threat. The exhibition has since inspired further iterations: Trees at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai (2021), Living Worlds (Les Vivants) at the Tripostal in Lille (2022), and Siamo Foresta at Triennale Milano (2023).

Through its recognized commitment to these pressing contemporary issues, the Fondation Cartier takes part in major international events on climate urgency, such as COP15 in 2009 and COP21 in 2015. Deeply meaningful in its approach, through the removal of disciplinary boundaries and the dialogues it fosters, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain stands at the crossroads of worlds — at the very heart of international debates.

On June 15, 1990, it hosted the reunion of the legendary Velvet Underground for a one-of-a-kind concert that became a landmark event in the history of the institution. On the evening of the opening of the Andy Warhol System exhibition, organized by the Fondation Cartier—then located in Jouy-en-Josas—Lou Reed and John Cale, soon joined by the band’s two other founding members, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker, paid a surprise tribute to their friend and former mentor Andy Warhol, who had passed away in 1987.

Following this seminal event, the Fondation Cartier launched the Nomadic Nights in 1994 in its building on Boulevard Raspail—a foreboding concept for its time, opening exhibition spaces to the performing arts. For these evenings, the Fondation Cartier invited artists to experiment beyond established conventions, whether they were internationally renowned figures such as singer and musician Patti Smith or choreographer Trisha Brown, or emerging young talents. The Fondation Cartier accompanied them in conceiving ephemeral projects, often created in situ, allowing them to take over its galleries or the garden with unique performances where, for one night, visual arts, music, cinema, theater, dance, fashion, literature, and sound poetry intersect.

Alongside its exhibitions, visitors are thus invited to experience something different—outside the traditional theater setting—for truly singular moments. Filmmaker Marie Losier, for instance, staged a queer Mexican wrestling match followed by a conversation with the genre’s star, Cassandro el Exótico; architect Freddy Mamani and designer Ana Palza imagined an Andean celebration featuring the Chola Paceña, women from the Indigenous Aymara communities of La Paz; and Trisha Brown’s piece Man Walking Down the Side of a Building was re-created at the Fondation Cartier, with a dancer descending its glass façade.

Artists from the rock and underground scenes have also performed here, including John Cale, Chrysta Bell, Stuart A. Staples—solo or with Tindersticks—Peaches and Gonzales, Boredoms, Animal Collective, Blixa Bargeld, and Jeff Mills. In 2024, the Fondation Cartier once again innovated by giving carte blanche, for the first time, to another institution within its walls: The Centre for the Less Good Idea, founded by William Kentridge and Bronwyn Lace in 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Hosted in residence on Boulevard Raspail, it presented a week of workshops, performances, concerts, and encounters featuring around thirty artists from South Africa, Benin, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, and France.

Cinema holds a significant place in the history of the Fondation Cartier. Through long-standing dialogues with filmmakers such as Agnès Varda (L’Île et Elle, 2006) and Takeshi Kitano (Gosse de Peintre), the Fondation Cartier has revealed lesser-known aspects of their creative worlds, extending beyond their usual fields of expression.

In 2007, in a scenography imagined by David Lynch himself, the exhibition The Air Is on Fire brought together paintings, photographs, and countless drawings, sketches, and notes created between 1960 and 2006, some carefully preserved since his teenage years. By presenting works that had rarely been seen by the public, Lynch shed light on the origins and evolution of his obsessions and aesthetic—first evident in his visual art and later in his films. This groundbreaking exhibition captured the attention of audiences and major international institutions alike, revealing an essential dimension of his artistic universe.

Photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon, beyond the exhibitions dedicated to his work, has also collaborated on several Fondation Cartier projects that have taken him off the beaten path. In 2002, he followed the Yanomami people for the film Hunters and Shamans, created for the 2003 exhibition Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest, and again for Native Land, Stop Eject (2008), a project conceived with philosopher Paul Virilio. Alongside six other photographers, he documented the desert for the 2000 exhibition Desert, and later filmed, with Claudine Nougaret, mathematicians for Mathematics: A Beautiful Elsewhere (2011), and sound artist Bernie Krause for The Great Animal Orchestra (2016).

Another landmark commitment by the Fondation Cartier to cinema came in 2020 with the first exhibition in France dedicated to Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian. It presented an unprecedented dialogue between Nature (2020)—his first film in twenty-seven years—The Earth of People (1966), and The Seasons (1975). Commissioned jointly in 2005 by the Fondation Cartier and the ZKM Filminstitut (Karlsruhe, Germany), Nature represents the culmination of fifteen years of work by this visionary filmmaker, whose rare body of work has been celebrated worldwide.

Beyond presenting the works of filmmakers within its exhibitions, the Fondation Cartier has also taken an active role in film production. It has supported the creation and dissemination of numerous films outside the conventions of the traditional film industry, encouraging filmmakers to experiment with new and unconventional formats.

In 2024, the Fondation Cartier presented the first institutional exhibition in France in over a decade devoted to American artist Matthew Barney. Alongside specially conceived works, he showcased his latest video installation SECONDARY. As part of the accompanying program of events and performances, the Fondation Cartier collaborated with the legendary independent cinema Christine Cinéma Club, located in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, for a marathon screening—an exceptional retrospective of The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films made between 1994 and 2002. Through surreal and hallucinatory imagery, this cycle transports viewers into a fantastical, unprecedented universe—a dense network of symbols and metaphors interwoven across mythology, autobiography, and history. Co-produced by the Fondation Cartier, Cremaster 3 remains a singular work, unforgettable for its strangeness and aesthetic power, captivating cinephiles and contemporary art lovers alike.

The Fondation Cartier carries on with this multidisciplinary programming in its new spaces at 2, Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, making full use of its dynamic architectural design to explore the fertile intersections between performance and exhibition practices.