PARIS.- Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians: a good fifty artists have taken over the Palais de Tokyo and are being presented without any geographical grouping, mostly via new productions and in situ interventions. The exhibition is being presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed.

Raw and head-spinning hangings, mysterious landscapes, luminous or opaque zones, backrooms and traps: the presentation of the show has been conceptualised by the architect Olivier Goethals, according to the rhythms of day and night, from profusion to desaturation, alternating between monographic zones and terrains for encounters. He has elaborated an architectural pathway which reveals and accentuates the lines of force in the Palais de Tokyo’s building, which is here being envisaged as an immense common area, like “places where the thoughts of the world encounter the thoughts of the world”. (1)

Palais Magazine #29 will provide the possibility to dive into or contextualise the creations presented in the exhibition, through the contributions of thinkers, critics, curators, artists, poets, researchers… A mix of voices and visions which will mean being able better to hone in on the creation coming from this era of megacities and urban humanity.

WORD FROM THE CURATORS
Between skyscrapers and shacks, urgency and patience, megacities are undergoing a chaotic expansion, mingling transfers of capital with technological connexions in financial centres, generating urban margins with numerous inequalities. This vast, disorderly movement transforms cities into ceaseless work sites, favouring imaginary deviations. The artists which then emerge are thus the flâneurs of the 21st century, the hackers of our responses to an urban environment which is often functional and standardized.

DHAKA, LAGOS, MANILA, MEXICO CITY and TEHRAN: all of them are subjectively chosen rhizomatic architectures, guided by a curiosity about the moment. All five are expressions of a tissue of contradictions, as seen in their saturated traffic which coexists with digital networks which supposedly work fluidly. Quite clearly, these megacities are very different from one another. Their cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.

Spoiler: these megacities are not the subject of the exhibition City Prince/sses . They are the context for a research, a playground, in which creators sample the multiple layers that make them up so as to extract an outsized hybridization, in constant metamorphosis.

Since the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit in 2012, the capital of Bangladesh has attracted the attention of the international art world. But what mattered was seeking out its vitality beyond this biannual event and seeing how such an artistic scene is organised, above all in the absence of galleries. In this respect, DHAKA astonishes thanks to its discreet power. Here, artists have been developing independent militant sites, where their friends can be invited through the backdoor. They are aware of the fragility of certain folk traditions, like the numerous rickshaws whose craft paintings are disappearing, to be replaced by digital prints, or by the saloons of the Uber car company. So it is that artists are attempting to document a memory that is sometimes wavering, while elaborating approaches in which the grip of history goes through the very inflexions of a dream world.

LAGOS makes the entire world dance with its Afro Pop music. Nollywood productions are now a constant presence on the international film scene. And the city has become an unmissable date for its Fashion Week, which every year highlights exceptional creators, while the art world is being consolidated, taking in contemporary art fairs, dynamic institutions and artist-run spaces. Such initiatives lessen the gap between the islands and the mainland and highlight a scene of young or established artists, shifting between street photographers, political performances, immersive sound installations and political songs, on a background (noise) of creaky electricity generators.

When it comes to MANILA, already explored twice by the teams of the Palais de Tokyo, what springs to mind is the crossover of Asian, Spanish and American influences. Thus, the figure of Christ can encounter the punk scene or graffiti via a sudden shortcut. It is a continual patchwork working to the rhythm of Jeepneys with a tuning look, which in themselves convey the constantly visible recycling of this city. Despite the police violence which has been afflicting the nightlife and alternative worlds since the election of President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, artists continue to occupy the slightest interstices. There is in Manila an intensity which is expressed in the way in which each artist collects, recuperates, combines, mingles and agglomerates, with the fervour of gold seekers.

Just as in its huge markets, where can be found a mixture of local and made-in-China products, faked big brands, animals for sacrifices, sex toys and all kinds of drugs, MEXICO CITY is possessed with an unprecedented intensity. Over the past ten years, more than ever this cultural Eldorado has been attracting a large number of foreign artists who now live there. Its alternative scene dances to synthetic vitamins, stands up for LGBT rights, while also creating a series of political or illegal murals, joining up in independent groups, reinventing haute couture with a barrio tinge or militating against the unbridled globalization which is ravaging both nature and local Native American cultures. This untameable energy could well now be accentuated thanks to a political change, with a government whose central policy is the struggle against corruption and inequalities, as well as the protection of the rights of minorities.

Forty years ago, the Iranian revolution shook up the international geopolitical scene by establishing the first Islamic regime in the modern world. The current youth of TEHRAN – brought up by a generation that experienced opium and freedom associated with a massive cultural heritage – is constantly pushing back the frontiers and bypassing restrictions. This high energy, connected on social media, can be found among its artists, whose work reveals a committed combat, a nostalgia for an era when Tehran was like Los Angeles, disturbing images that dissect painting, surrealistic landscapes of sculptures, films made behind closed doors, or cavernous, sexual, fantastical and magical forms.


(1) Edouard Glissant, in La Cohée du Lamentin, Poétique V, Gallimard, 2005