Leaping in time from 19th century adventurer-photographers to contemporary artists, this exhibition focuses on the desert-as-landscape. A space of unity, the desert is also a place of contrast and contradictions. It is an encounter between the static, the permanence of a suspended instant, and the perpetual movement of a changing landscape and dunes transformed by the winds. Faced with the threat of change, erasure, and disappearance, the urgency to capture traces inscribed in the desert finds its solution in the photographic medium, this art that unveils, whose essence is that of the “decisive instant”, the impression, and the image.
Exhibition overview
the desert is an exhibition of images and films that places 19th century photography face to face with a group of commissioned projects executed by ten artists. On the occasion of the exhibition, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain decided to take an exceptional approach and invited six artists to travel to the desert in Egypt, Mali, Australia, and the United States, and four others to “travel” through images of the desert.
Artists and contributors of the exhibition:
- Bill Viola,
- Walter De Maria,
- Lee Friedlander,
- Balthasar Burkhard,
- Raymond Depardon,
- Beat Streuli,
- Andrei Ujica,
- Lara Baladi,
- William Eggleston,
- Yervant Gianikian,
- Anselm Kiefer,
- Titouan Lamazou,
- Michael Light,
- Angela Ricci Lucchi,
- Michal Rovner,
- Sir Wilfred Thesiger,
- Paul Virilio
The exhibition in detail
Image gallery
