Exhibitions

The Fondation Cartier for Contemporary Art has spent over 20 years developing a programme that explores the most urgent issues and challenges facing the environment. During this time, its collection has grown to include numerous artworks which encourage the spectator to re-examine their perspective on the beauty and vulnerability of the living world. Bringing together nearly 250 artworks, mainly from this collection, Les Vivants (Living Worlds) aims to transport our imagination beyond anthropocentric limits in order to reinvent, with empathy and humility, a new way of living on planet Earth with the plants and animals. 

 Countering Western traditions, Les Vivants (Living Worlds) invites us to reflect on what we see and hear to start viewing non-humans as our equals within a vast shared world, the living world. The exhibition calls upon a community of artists and scientists who are engaged in an aesthetic and existential quest, profoundly marked by the enigmatic beauty of the living world. These include American musician and bio-acoustician Bernie Krause, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, French visual artist Fabrice Hyber, as well as Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, French botanist Francis Hallé, and American artist Tony Oursler. Their works are some of the most iconic pieces in the Fondation Cartier collection, thanks to several years of joint projects between these artists and the institution. The Living Worlds exhibition in Lille also offers the Fondation Cartier an opportunity to develop new collaborations with artists such as Bruno Novelli and Solange Pessoa from Brazil. 

It all started with anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s iconic book, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, written in 1995. Having studied civilisations in Asia, Latin America and Northern Europe, he reached an irrefutable conclusion. Men and women described as shamans all share a common feature: for thousands of years, they have depicted, in the form of two intertwined serpents, the double helix of DNA which scientists only discovered in 1953! 

Taking Jeremy Narby’s research as a starting point, French philosopher Edgar Morin observed, in his work On Aesthetics, that historic and contemporary artists create in a “post-shamanic” state, without even being aware of it, in connection with the living world. 

These two points of reference have inspired Le serpent cosmique (cosmic serpent) exhibition which offers a new reading of man’s artistic adventure within the world, in close contact with nature and the cosmic beyond, i.e. the invisible. 

Offering a prolific and multi-sensory exhibition, designed as a maze-like, organic, surprising and sometimes even hallucinatory journey, it travels with sensitivity through a diverse range of artistic movements and practices, from Arte Povera to interactive and experiential installations, from shamanic art to contemporary paintings by young artists. 

The cosmic serpent showcases the crucial role of the artist in our understanding and perception of the world and the creative act as a quasi-shamanic trance state. 

Curatorship: Fabrice Bousteau 

In The Garden of Eden, artists and designers showcase creations and installations, which question the narrative of the utopian idea and raise a number of fundamental questions faced by humanity. They also propose creative solutions and bring about change by developing inspiring and sensible ideas. Together, whether large or small-scale, practical or hypothetical, these visions will represent a laboratory of ambitious ideas that could, in their own way, contribute to making the world a better place. 
Discover The Garden of Eden via:  

• Le parcours olfactif de Peter de Cupere dans l’Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine.
• Une exposition sensorielle d’artistes et designers belges, français et finlandais à la maison Folie Moulins.
• Une carte blanche à l’artiste Joana Vasconcelos à la maison folie Wazemmes, présente également dans la Gare Lille Flandres. 
• Et les Moss People géants de Kim Simonsson sur la rue Faidherbe. 

Curators : Siegrid Demyttenaere + Sofie Lachaert (lsd2)
With: Joana Vasconcelos (maison Folie Wazemmes), Mathieu Frossard, Cyril Lancelin, Kim Simonsson, Peter Van Den Ende, (maison Folie Moulins) et Peter de Cupere (maison Folie Moulins et Église Sainte Marie Madeleine)

Peter de Cupere is an olfactory artist who works with perfumes and scents. He creates artworks that are designed to explore our sense of smell. As part of the Garden of Eden exhibition (→ page 23), he is presenting a series of olfactory works at the Church of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine which prompts its audience to follow their noses. Fragrum Cardamomi, a monumental, 9-metre installation, represents a flowering bulb with long stems that stretch up towards the sky. Visitors are invited to approach the sculpture and scratch its surface to release a fragrance into the air. This olfactory journey continues at the Maison Folie Moulins, alongside works by Cyril Lancelin, Kim Simonsson and Peter Van den Ende. 

Pauline Di Valentin presents a series of ink drawings on paper at Espace Édouard Pignon as part of Utopia, creating a backdrop of imaginary places, architectures and vegetation. Inspired by film and photography, she composes her works as snapshots, leaving the scene in an unreal temporality, and giving the spectator freedom to imagine the story. 

Each of these villas and constructions, which shift from Italian to Californian to Japanese, seem to rise out of the same land, an unknown space, covered with dense jungle and populated with waterfalls, lakes and palm trees. Nature surrounds the houses with landscapes and plants from different climates side by side, making the locations even more undefinable, a sort of paradise almost untouched by humans. While the buildings sometimes recall the utopian architecture of the Brutalist movement, the ornamentations and mosaics of marble and terrazzo as well as the assemblies are rooted in a story that evokes peace, wonder and even amusement. The pale pink that colours the works acts as the central theme of these utopian tales, opening up for visitors a perspective on their own life stories. 

In this utopian world, the photographs of the Moss People by Finnish artist Kim Simonsson, one of the key figures participating in the Utopia event, and Jefunne Gimpel engage in a dialogue with the works of the Lille-based artist, Ingrid Bouttaz. 

The world created by Finnish artist Kim Simonsson is a comprehensive artwork that will be showcased in the region at the Utopia event. Large-scale versions of the Moss People will take over the Rambla (rue Faidherbe) in Lille, like a group of giants. 

Simonsson’s Moss People are also central to this exhibition at the Jardin Minorelle. Elaborate staging is used to incorporate the figures into different contexts. Jefunne Gimpel often photographs them in natural settings, where they blend into the landscape, or takes the opposite approach, depicting them in more industrial environments, removed from the imaginary world to which they belong. These little elvish creatures will find themselves amidst delicate ceramics by Ingrid Bouttaz, which encapsulate the physical connection between Man and Nature within the material.