PARIS.- Palais de Tokyo invited Tomás Saraceno to take over the entirety of the 13,000 m² of its exhibition spaces in Autumn 2018, for the fourth edition of its “Carte Blanche” started with Philippe Parreno in 2013, followed by Tino Sehgal in 2016, and Camille Henrot in 2017. The Carte Blanche entitled ON AIR is his largest project to date, bringing a selection of his major works together with ambitious new productions that transforms Palais de Tokyo into a uniquely sensory experience.
ON AIR is thought as an ecosystem in becoming, hosting a renewed choreography and polyphony between human and non-human universes, with artworks revealing common, fragile and ephemeral rhythms and trajectories between these worlds. As a hybrid organism, ON AIR builds itself with the myriad presences, visible and invisible, that meet and cohabit within it. Some voices are reduced into quietude, whilst others, usually less heard, are magnified. The exhibition performs a not-yet-audible hymn of the illegible ties between beings, the unspeakable togetherness of earthly and cosmic phenomena, a reality which is impossible to describe, but can maybe be felt.
The works gathered reveal what resists our sight. This to build a space and a time in which our knowledge extends beyond what is visible, making tangible physically and virtually, the strength of the presences floating in the air and the way they affect us: from particulate matter to cosmic dust, from radio frequencies to sonic pollution. Thus, the invisible histories that tie us appear, those inviting us to rethink poetically the way we inhabit the world – and to reevaluate our way of being human.
Supporting and promoting an interconnected culture, the show celebrates new modes of knowledge production and opens up to the debate and global challenges posed by the Anthropocene, a word proposed to define the current epoch we live in on Planet Earth, in which some human activities leave an impact so important that they modify the geological layers of our planet and its evolution.
It is especially through the activities of Aerocene, an interdisciplinary artistic project initiated by Tomás Saraceno, that seeks to reactivate a common imaginary to collaborate ethically with the atmosphere and the environment, that the visitors are invited to engage collectively in this exercise of planetary attunement.
The carte blanche echoes Tomás Saraceno’s artistic practice as it reunites a great variety of collaborators and collaborations, bringing together scientific institutions, research groups, activists, local communities, musicians, philosophers, animals, celestial phenomena and visitors, who equally take part in the evolution of the exhibition as well. Workshops, jamming sessions with spiders, public symposiums regularly enrich the carte blanche and constantly transform Palais de Tokyo, metamorphosed for a few weeks in a vast “cosmic jam session”.
Tomás Saraceno was born in 1973 in Tucamán, Argentina. He lives and works in and beyond the planet Earth.
After obtaining his Masters in architecture at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes de la Nación Ernesto de la Cárcova in Buenos Aires, Tomás Saraceno studied Fine Art at the Städelschule in Francfort, followed by a Masters in Art and Architecture at the IUAV in Venice. Saraceno then moved to Berlin, where he works on projects that aim to travel “on and beyond planet Earth”. In 2009, the artist’s work was exhibited at the 53rd Venice Biennale, “Fare Mundi” directed by Daniel Birnbaum. His last major solo shows include “Cloud Cities”, presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin in 2011, and “On Space Time Foam” at the HangarBicocca in Milan in 2012. The same year, Saraceno produced an in situ Cloud City installation at the Metropolitan Museum of New York’s rooftop. Since 2013, Düsseldorf’s K21 Ständenhaus presents his aerial installation In Orbit, and in 2016 the show “Stillness in Motion, Cloud Cities” has been on at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
He has held residencies at Centre National d’Études Spatiales (2014–2015), MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (2012–ongoing) and Atelier Calder (2010), among others. His work has been widely exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions, and is included in the collections of MoMA, New York; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin; among others.
Tomás Saraceno first presented his work at Palais de Tokyo in February 2015 in the exhibition “Le Bord des Mondes”, then proposed the seminar Aerocene along with the workshop “Museo Aerosolar”, in response to the COP21 in December 2015. His work Du sol au soleil was on view from October 2017 to January 2018 in Palais de Tokyo’s offsite exhibition « Voyage d’Hiver » in the gardens of Versailles’s castle.
Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel
