For years, the Centre national des arts plastiques (French National Centre for Visual Arts) has been assembling a remarkable collection dedicated to the often intangible creations developed around the inexact notion of “performance.” A selection of this little-known collection is presented for the first time at Palais de Tokyo and completed by the invitation of several artists.

Des choses en moins, des choses en plus is an exhibition based on the formal and participatory collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques, exploring the conception and the grammar of the exhibition form via the prism of the performing arts. Adopting a resolutely prospective stance, the CNAP’s collection acquisitions and commissions of the past few years have demonstrated an interest in the performing arts, or in how—in a cross-disciplinary approach—performative, auditory and choreographic elements can reinvent new relationships to the artwork and its context. In this way, the collection offers a panorama onto a new generation of artists seeking to question the exhibition apparatus and its definition by producing works that are performative, fragmentary, participatory or in progress: all these proposals taking place not for the audience but with the audience.

Shifting back and forth between participation and observation, this project encourages the viewers to choreograph his own presence. As a dialogue between the public space and the exhibition space, between the artist and the audience, between art as object and art as action, the exhibition fully inhabits the space while playing on a constellation of receptive attitudes around the production and the exhibition of the artwork.

Protocols to activate, shared statutes, the rules of the institution called into question, situation reversals, Des choses en moins, des choses en plus brings together about 40 artists and seeks to explore new possible syntaxes in which each proposal brings with it the hypothesis of an answer to the project’s cornerstone. The exhibition is thus materialized by those who experience it: the artists, the viewers, but also the Palais de Tokyo staff who will activate the pieces and bring them to life.

With: Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, Beatrice Balcou, Davide Balula, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Pierre Bismuth, Ulla von Brandenburg, Malena Beer, Olivier Cadiot, Hsia-Fei Chang, Boris Charmatz, Thomas Clerc, Antonio Contador & Julie Bena, Carole Douillard, Mounir Fatmi, Didier Faustino, Christophe Fiat, Nicolas Floc’h, Ceal Floyer, Andrea Fraser, Esther Ferrer, Dora Garcia, Mauricio Ianes, IKHEA©SERVICES, Ann Veronica Janssens, Philippe Katerine, Elodie Lesourd, Robin McGinley, Christian Marclay, Gordon Matta-Clarck, Joris van de Moortel, Melik Ohanian, Roman Ondak, Cecile Paris, Steven Parrino, Maxime Rossi, Noe Soulier, Annie Vigier & Franck Apertet (les gens d’Uterpan), Michel Verjux, Lawrence Weiner, Ian Wilson, Fred Wiseman

Curators: Agnès Violeau, independant curator and Sébastien Faucon, Visual Art Collection Manager at the CNAP

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www.cnap.fr