Summer at the Palais
While many of us were enthralled by the multifarious offerings on view in Basel, the Palais de Tokyo launched its new Summer season of exhibitions. Marked by an innovative use of the Palais’s cavernous, underground spaces, these exhibitions seek to take advantage of the cooler lower floors and transform them into further places of discovery.
You can click on any of the photos below to learn more, and a few words about “Il morso delle termiti” as well as Laura Lamiel’s show here below:
"Il morso delle termiti"
This exhibition curated by the Palais de Tokyo’s own Hugo Vitrani reinterprets art history through the lens of graffiti. Graffiti is not viewed as a subject or aesthetic, but rather as an experience, attitude, and underground current of thought. The exhibition explores the illegal and rebellious nature of graffiti, the movement and exploration of bodies, our fascination with hidden perspectives, and the transformative power of visible and invisible languages.
The show brings together around fifty artists, some well-known and others less so, and fosters a fragmented and sometimes cryptic dialogue between them all. The term "termite artists," coined by Manny Farber in 1962, is used to describe artists whose practices are difficult to grasp and manipulate. They challenge their own limitations and leave behind traces of their industrious and disorderly activity.
Structurally, the exhibition resembles an invisible city, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's book "Invisible Cities." We as visitors navigate through streets adorned with signs protruding from the walls, where our eyes perceive not objects, but rather representations that symbolize something more.
The exhibition's title, "Il morso delle termiti" (The Bite of Termites), is inspired by Calvino's book, and it reflects the progressive and boundary-breaking nature of graffiti art, similar to how termites consume their own constraints and leave traces of their activity behind.
Views of the exhibition Il Morso delle termiti, Palais de Tokyo (16.06.2023 – 07.01.2024). Photo: Aurélien Mole
“Vous les entendez?” // Laura Lamiel
Laura Lamiel, an artist with over forty years of experience, often explores various perceptual, mental, and emotional states in her work. Through the juxtaposition of found objects, raw materials, colors, and lights, she creates artworks that simultaneously reveal and conceal physical and psychological spaces. Lamiel bridges the gaps between different artistic vocabularies, exploring the intersection of the intimate and the social, the existential and the everyday.
This exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo showcases both existing pieces and new works from her oeuvre, encompassing painting, installation, photography, video, and drawing. The exhibition creates an immersive landscape, infused with invisible presence and charged with electric silences. The artworks emit a white light that veils the space in an artificial penumbra. Lamiel's installations play with opacity, transparency, and the juxtaposition of contrasting materials such as enameled steel, copper, cotton, glass, fabric, mirrors, and metal; these elements interact with accumulated objects and furniture, creating a truly dynamic energy.
The show, whose title translates as “Do You Hear Them?,” is conceived as a single installation in dialogue with the Palais de Tokyo's architecture. It demonstrates Lamiel's meticulous attention to space, both within the exhibition and in her artistic practice. The exhibition unfolds in concentric waves, with scattered pieces across the lowest level of the building. Chromatic cues guide visitors to delve into Lamiel's "studio-brain" and experience recorded sounds from the banks of the Ganges. Exploring echoes, vibrations, buzzing, as well as silences and breaths, the exhibition experiments with the very nature of thought, navigating between forward and backward leaps, flashes, and recollections, revealing interior and exterior worlds in a chiaroscuro fashion. It prompts us as viewers to listen to our inner voices and to engage with the diverse states of being the world that surround us.
Exhibition views, Laura Lamiel, Vous les entendez ?, Palais de Tokyo, 16/06/2023 - 10/09/2023. Photo credit: Aurélien Mole