Palais de Tokyo Sping 2025 Exhibitions

What is it to speak of joy today? When the media is so often anxiety ridden, menacing and gloomy? What about speaking of community, when the prevailing mood seems to favor individualism and inward-looking attitudes, masking the positive impulses and new forms of solidarity at work in many circles of society?

It’s with this in mind that the Palais de Tokyo presented “Collective Joy” its Sping 2025 season of exhibitions, featuring a group show, exhibitions by Rammellzee and Raphaël Barontini, an iconographic project, a magazine and a dense cultural programme with a strong emphasis on performance art, including the first edition of plan D, a collaborative programme with the Centre national de la danse designed to resonate with the season’s exhibitions. Collective joy not as denial or enchanted parenthesis, not as a suspension of lucidity, but as a conscious and active resistance to the depressive order of the world. A remedy as much as a tool. A commitment and a safeguard. But also an opportunity to connect contemporary creation with forms outside the strict canons of art, sailing towards other aesthetic currents, other “genres”, calling upon other forms of imagery.

Collective exhibition, ‘Collective Joy - Learning to blaze!”

“Collective Joy – Learning how to blaze!” is an exhibition interested in popular culture of gathering, and group dynamics conductive to the experience and learning of joy in our daily life. The show gets together a blazing international scene of artists and initiatives inspired by festive, political, but also aeshetic, musical, recreational and utopic forms of investing the public space. Attentive to artistic modalities, often collaborative and relational practices, infused with cultural rights and social justice values, Collective Joy – Learning how to blaze!, celebrated our ways to create common ground and to organize collectively. Through the creation of an interactive situation, and an open mic program, the project transformed the space into a place of sociability dedicated to promote participation and creative expression.

RAMMELLZEE

The first institutional retrospective of a central, yet often overlooked figure of the New York graffiti and hip-hop scenes in the 1980s.

Palais de Tokyo has partnered with the CAPC art center in Bordeaux to present an unprecedented two-venue solo exhibition of American artist RAMELLZEE, a multimedia enigma who was at the heart of the effervescent New York art scene of the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Working across all medias, sculpture, textile, painting, drawing, photography, video and music, RAMMELLZEE also left a lasting mark on the European art scene, particularly within the fashion industry, from Valentino to Supreme, Nike and particularly Louis Vuitton.

Raphaël Barontini, “Somewhere in the night, the people dance”

The exhibition devoted to Raphaël Barontini will be his most important solo show in France to date. It is an opportunity to showcase the diversity of media used by the artist: paintings, banners, textiles and costumes will be displayed side by side in an original and ambitious scenography that includes an immersive sound intervention.

The exhibition focused on the way in which the artist creolises history, particularly in Africa and the Caribbean, to give a new place to those who have been invisibilised and forgotten. Drawing onboth real and fictional accounts, Raphaël Barontini proposes a renewal of the imaginary through combinations of photographs, silkscreens, paintings and digital prints.

The artist questions figuration, revisiting the tradition of historical painting and the representation of colonial power in a place - the Palais de Tokyo - that is not a museum but an art centre, and is therefore not concerned with collecting but with exploring. The exhibition formed a comprehensive and generous narrative linking Raphaël Barontini’s different areas of work, accompanied by a parade devised by the artist in connection with the tradition of the Guadeloupean Mas (person, group of people or costume marching alongside official processions)

Symbiosis

Starting in January and continuing throughout 2025, the Palais de Tokyo invited choreographer Sharon Eyal and producer Gai Behar, the founding duo of Sharon Eyal Dance company (S-E-D), to inaugurate a new annual long-term format dedicated to performance: Symbiosis.

With Symbiosis, the Palais de Tokyo continues its collaboration with performance artists and reaffirms its commitment to sustaining these relationships over the long term, within a framework inspired by institutional permaculture that guides the institution’s project.

The artists invited throughout the year as part of this new format will thus be able to expand their work to engage with the building’s spaces and programs through various forms of interaction with the public, from discreet and intimate interventions to more spectacular gestures.