"Un monde réel" Tour

Sarah Sze’s artistic practice is steeped in her interest in science, helping her understand the world. The central sculpture is composed of pieces of steel and the imprint of these pieces in a large circle of marble fragments, creating a superimposition of real forms and traces. Objects and materials used to produce the piece are found around the circles, evoking a workspace frozen in time. Videos are projected onto these elements, showing images of materials transforming (molten metal, melted glass, and more) and images of changing sky. Other videos are seen along the walls of the space – projections that appear and dissipate, echoing how we perceive and remember the world around us. Together, these objects and images invite consideration of the fluid boundaries between the physical and the virtual.

This installation presents digital maps illustrating different types of migratory flows (political refugees; conflict-induced forced migration; revenues earned abroad and sent to the earner’s home country; flight from rising sea levels, natural disasters, and more). It documents other subjects of major concern, such as deforestation and the disappearance of some languages. The maps were drawn up using data collected by scientists and analyzed by a multidisciplinary association of philosophers, statisticians, artists, and architects, who concur that global warming is not only an environmental problem, but a deeply political issue as well.

EXIT is at once a work of art and a documentary presentation, based on hard data displayed in intelligible fashion to enable new understanding of the world.

A prolific experimenter and inventor, the Belgian artist Panamarenko made machines involving scientific and technical rigor, at the crossroads of scientific imagination and technological utopia. The work on display is a veritable steel submarine equipped with a motor; but the technical realism of its machinery does not rule out, as here, potential failure – with functions that are relative or even secondary. Bearing the names of three territories at the limits of reality and imagination – the Panama Canal, the Arctic island of Spitzbergen, and the remote archipelago of Nova Zemblaya – these toponyms resonate as promises of expedition. An invitation on a journey, this work conjures the utopias of modern times, pushing the boundaries of human exploration through science.

An internationally renowned contemporary comic artist, Jean Giraud worked under two pseudonyms: Gir, illustrator of the realistically drawn Blueberry series, set in the American West; and Mœbius, his visionary double, specialized in science fiction. In his notebooks, he explored storylines at the crossroads of dream and reality. They hold drawings of two of his major works: Le chasseur déprime (2008) and 40 jours dans le désert B (1999). This notebook shows the importance of bodily metamorphosis in the work of Mœbius. Alongside tentacled bodies and bionic machinery, it contains Gir’s more realistic studies, including portraits of Native Americans.