PARIS.- “Inside” gives the visitor a unique experience, a risky voyage through oneself in which the exhibition space is the subject of the metaphor. This odyssey—as much physical as it is mental—is an invitation to walk through the Palais de Tokyo, metamorphosed by the artists in such a way that, from one installation to the next, from one floor to another, we find ourselves inside the works. These works, some of which were created specifically for the exhibition, bring us close to the very core of our being, from our experience of the space to our most secret thoughts and fears.

Similarly to darkrooms, the inner world is an ideal place for the appearance of images: from cave paintings and origin myths to discovering a subject’s interiority, from the inner turmoil of melancholy to the vast territory of the unconscious. For the Surrealists, it meant accessing the power of dreams; for Bataille, it was an ecstatic search for the most extreme states of thought. “Inside” also creates the possibility of plunging into the psyche of certain artists whose featured works are like so many mental projections that push the visitor to confront his or her own interiority.

This long tour through the exhibition is an opportunity of experiencing the building—transformed into an organism to be explored—in the manner of a journey, from physical to mental, from psychological to spiritual, according to the archetype of the initiatory journey. All of the works create an experience at once sensorial and emotional. “Inside” calls on all the emotions that make our humanity: joy, worry, fear, horror, desire, pleasure… A deep, troubling and unexpected experience.

Made up only of transparent Scotch tape, this monumental installation by Numen/For Use (Sven Jonke, born in 1973, lives and works in Berlin; Christophe Katzler, born in 1968, lives and works in Vienna and Nikola Radeljkovic, born in 1971, lives and works in Zagreb) sprawls throughout the Palais de Tokyo’s entrance hall like a stretched canvas. The arms of this mass hanging off the building reveals glimpses of its organic innards. The structure invites visitors to walk towards the starting point of the exhibition, Inside. The bravest have the possibility of penetrating into this protective matrix and the journey through it constitutes the first stage in the exploration of an inner space that is physical as much as it is mental. Numen/ For Use is a collective that, since the 2000s, has also worked in the areas of scenography and the visual arts. Their experimental creations – not destined for any preconceived use – are usually immersive and always activated by the viewer.

In order to enter the exhibition « Inside », the visitor must first dare to step into a mysterious forest created by Eva Jospin (born in 1975, lives and works in Paris). The forest – an incarnation of nature in the wild – is above all the setting in traditional storytelling of tests of courage, and can be a gloomy or initiatory place. The forest is also where one encounters oneself. This walk through the forest initiates the visit to « Inside », which is also an inner journey. Eva Jospin works with cardboard to create volume and perspective, creating evocative bas-reliefs. A painstaking process of cutting, assemblage and overlay coupled with an element of violence in her gestures enable her to carve out dense yet delicate, mysterious and soothing forests. The artist realizes works that manage to be both frontal and immersive, the perfect media for mental projection via a familiar material devoid of any intrinsic aesthetic quality.

Sounds from Beneath (2011 - 2012) presents a choir of former miners who imitate the sounds of the mine through singing. The clink of the machines, the muted echo of the galleries and the murmur of hundreds of men at work rise up over the desolate landscape. Like a call to go underground, this video by Mikhail Karikis (born in 1975, lives and works in London) and Uriel Orlow (born in 1973, lives and works in London) serves as the introduction to the exhibition “Inside”. The spatial inversion gives rise to the mental representation of an underground world, buried and invisible, that visitors will have occasion to explore during the exhibition. Mikhail Karikis works with the human voice as with any material. In his videos, he studies the sound of the voice, its plastic possibilities but also its relationship to the collective identity in a societal perspective. For Sounds from Beneath, he worked with Uriel Orlow whose work focuses notably on the construction of stories and landscape as a place of memory and history.

Diagonal Section (2014) is an apparently illusionist work by Marcius Galan (born in 1972, lives and works in São Paulo) that enables the visitor to pass “through the looking glass”, taking him on an initiatory journey. A work of great simplicity, this on-site installation features a symbolic obstacle – insurmountable in principle – that only the bravest – or the most reckless – will succeed in overcoming. The artist proposes here a play on the perception (physical or mental) of our surrounding space. The intent is to deceive our senses: the work seems to dematerialize under our very eyes. A minimal and contextual approach producing work of great formal neutrality is at the heart of Marcius Galan’s practice. The artist creates a physical as well as mental unease with works that hover on the border of the usual systems of representation: what we see at first glance is never the true essence of the work. His architectural interventions and sculptures replace reality with its double and confront us with the representations that structure our relationship to space.

For the exhibition “Inside,” Marc Couturier (born in 1946, lives and works in Paris) was invited to continue his series of drawings entitled Troisième jour [third day] by realizing a monumental mural. This series refers to the Book of Genesis in which, on the third day of Creation, the waters withdraw from the earth on which Nature and vegetation are then created. These pencil drawings flow in one spontaneous and continuous gesture; they are a permanent dialogue between the artist’s intuition and will. And indeed the viewer can apprehend this work through an intuitive approach in which the landscape of Creation’s original surge reveals itself little by little. Majestic and delicate, the piece calls for contemplation and surrender and indicates that poetry exists inside each of us, away from reality. Marc Couturier gathers and collects objects and materials, identifying their poetic potential that he then reveals to the world. Lines and materials form a body of work that relates to monumental sculpture, such as the work Lames which suggests a contemplative relationship to the work of art.

Dove Allouche (born in 1972, lives and works in Paris) proposes three series of works that all share an experience of time and space. Les Pétrifiantes (2012) shows the viewer the long sculpting process at work in subterranean sources; Spores (2014) captures the activity of microscopic mushrooms in the air; and lastly Pétrographies (2014) enables us to experience the invisible: transversal stalagmite cross sections create a dating system. What is generally hidden to the human eye suddenly becomes visible; an organic interiority whose life span goes beyond the human timescale. A practitioner of rare and complex techniques (heliogravure, physautotype…), Dove Allouche makes images that exist at the edges of photography, drawing and printmaking. These often abstract works playing on black and white contrasts find their origin in the physical domain, whether that includes scientific experiments or the documentation of natural phenomena in their most extreme incarnations (such as an active volcano) or most sublime states (the sky rent by lightning).

The inhabitable sculpture by Abraham Poincheval (born in 1972, lives and works in Marseille) was created in collaboration with the Gassendi Museum (Dign-les- Bains) so that the artist could live in it autonomously, cut off from the outside world. During the thirteen days of his performance at the musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris), like Jonas in the whale’s stomach, the artist lived inside this life-sized bear sculpture, became one with the bear’s body and fed like a bear. This experience of extreme solitude and retreat from the world was filmed and transmitted via video. Abraham Poincheval explores the world by pushing back his physical and mental limits. The artist develops many approaches such as confinement, the absence of communication and living in self-sufficiency, spending for example a week in a hole dug into the floor of a gallery and covered by a one-ton stone (Galerie HO, Marseille, 2012). In 2013, he returned again to underground isolation and analyzed the total loss of visual and temporal markers when he spent five days with students in a pitch-black cave.

For his first exhibition in France, Ataru Sato (born in 1986, lives and works in Tokyo) realized a series of drawings specially conceived for “Inside”. The installation he proposes will become—for the duration of his stay in Paris—the receptacle of his personal universe. The red interior provides a setting for the color diary drawings that he has made since 2009. The diary drawings, as well as two framed drawings, appear as a materialization of the artist’s thoughts in the manner of a diary while on the outer walls, the artist’s encounters are drawn in black directly onto the wall. The wall thus becomes a focal point for the moments of exchanges, sharing and curiosity experienced by the artist during his Parisian residency.

Ataru Sato approaches his own existence through drawing. Through his obsessive practice he has elaborated a self-portrait that offers a glimpse into the profusion of his existence.

“Da Vinci”: a name evoking the masterpieces of art history, but also a remotely controlled medical robot allowing surgeons to perform operations. In this film, Yuri Ancarani, a filmmaker and artist (born in 1972, lives and works in Milan), takes the viewer inside the human body shown in shades of blue that bring to mind the “grotta azzura”, a mythical underwater cave in Capri. A danse with machines is observed here, signaling not a dehumanized environment but rather human intelligence at work. Quasi-documentary images, devoid of dialogue and focusing on the gesture: these are the distinguishing features of Yuri Ancarani’s films. Besides Da Vinci (2012), his trilogy on the notion of work includes Il Capo (2010), shot in a marble quarry in Carrara and Piattaforma, and Luna (2011), filmed around a deep-sea platform. These three films present extreme professions in which every gesture becomes choreographic and transforms those who perform them into heroes.

I Is… is a series of sculptures, three of which are presented here for the first time. Creating marble sculptures – a durable and noble material – taking after ephemeral huts built by his young daughter, Ryan Gander (born in 1976, lives and works in London) draws attention to the idea of protection: from the fragile child’s cabin whose symbolic protection is immense, to the marble cabin – solid yet impenetrable, with draped effects characteristic of classical sculpture. The works of Ryan Gander are like so many threads that create an enmeshment of forms and meanings (films, performances, photographs, installations…) – a mental puzzle carrying within it the legacy of conceptual art, whose meanings the artist unravels with humor. From a fake advertisement extolling the imaginary to a draft felt in a closed room, his multi-faceted work is never where one would expect it, and it plays off the complex relationship between reality and fiction.

Peter Buggenhout (born in 1963, lives and works in Ghent) has created, with Hold On (2014), a hybrid and imposing site-specific installation that seems, at first glance, to be an abandoned structure or a derelict building. It creates a sense that one has arrived too late, after the world has ended. The work leaves the viewer no other choice but to follow a labyrinthine and uneven pathway, amid the debris of gutted caravans and flaccid bouncy castles that one must nevertheless penetrate. Peter Buggenhout’s sculptures and installations seem to emanate from chaos, but an organized chaos, usually to a monumental scale. Assemblages of dust and trash mixing the organic, the mechanical and the industrial, his works are like so many relics of the mundane elevated to the rank of spiritual altar. The visitor is caught between fascination and fear, and by the anguish of not knowing what he is dealing with: the loss of one’s bearings is reinforced by an ode to the amorphous.

Surrounded by a transparent membrane, imitations of cells create an uneven path. Like the materialization of a mental space, this installation specially created for the exhibition by Mark Manders (born in 1968, lives and works in Ronse, Belgium) evokes the artist’s studio but also an archeological excavation site. The viewer imagines the humidity of the clay underneath the tarpaulins even though the sculptures are made of bronze while amputated human figures achieve symbiosis with elements of the architecture. For over twenty years, Mark Manders has been developing a longstanding self-portrait by means of sculpture, installations and architecture. Having himself called his work a “self-portrait as a building”, the artist mixes art historical references – from the solitary edifices of Giorgio De Chirico to the sculptures of young people in Ancient Greece – in order to conceive works that he wishes to see assembled in this building with its blacked-out windows that blends the future into the past.

Mike Nelson (born in 1967, lives and works in London) continues a serial work initiated in 1998 at Camden Arts Centre (London), and continued at the Mamco (Geneva) in 2005. The artist occupies what he has referred to as a “studio apparatus,” constructing a work which exists somewhere between exhibition and workshop. Nelson sees it as a creative space in which former objects and materials, as well as ideas, are preserved and re-articulated, a mechanism of sorts to predict the future of his own making. The piece proposed for “Inside” will be echoed with another work created concurrently at the Kunsthalle Münster. Each “apparatus” uses as a starting point an introduction to the book School for Crusoes, in which Jules Verne parodies his favorite genre of the “Mysterious Island”. Nelson uses these ideas of parody, as well as the motif of the island and the now clichéd scenario of its inhabitant, to conceptually construct the piece. The visitor is invited to enter into the psyche of the artist at a particular moment, between his past and future, an elusive chimera that one could consider as the present.

In Boxing (1977), Ion Grigorescu (born in 1945, lives and works in Bucharest) is fighting with his double with his bare hands. Through a simple photography trick – i.e. double exposure – the artist manages to bring to screen images of an inner struggle, the duality in each of us and the split nature of our personal and public lives. From the 1970s on he began using his body as his principal tool of experimentation. Realized in clandestinity, his first films showed him – often naked – in the intimacy of his home, away from police surveillance and the Ceaucescu regime. An important figure in Rumanian contemporary art, Ion Grigorescu uses photography, painting, film and lithography to express his search for an identity in a socially and politically tense climate. In even his recent works, autobiography and the exploration of the personal sphere have been a means of resistance for him.

The painter dran (born in 1979, lives and works in Toulouse) has taken over the big staircase connecting the two floors of the exhibition Inside. Unexposed to natural light, this graphic tour exclusively painted black feels like a descent into the bowels of the building. Filled with souvenirs, observations and emotions, stories and anecdotes, this intervention constitutes a spatial portrait that unfolds as one walks down the stairs. Comics, caricature and graffiti accompanied him all along his studies at the school of fine arts in Toulouse, creating a parallel world to a reality he felt he didn’t belong to. He gained recognition through his books, such as La télévision (2005) , Ma ville, je l’aime (2005) or 100 jours et quelques (2010) , suffused with satire, humor and a surrealist spirit. dran speaks through imagery as a mime would scream. Drawing and its therapeutic side are his link to the world outside and life.

The video installation No Reason Why (2010) by Hu Xiaoyuan (born in 1977, lives and works in Beijing) seems to show, at first glance, the strange and slow choreography of a cocoon moving across a table or in a box. In its protective envelope, a body is writhing; hatching seems imminent. Tightly wrapped in cloth, a girl struggles in a long performance without end that illustrates the thin line between protection and confinement, shelter and prison. Hu Xiaoyuan’s videos, drawings and installations isolate small repetitive movements and light impulses. Stretching across time, they are like so many fragments of life roused by an invisible breeze. Using fabric, organic materials and wood, Hu Xiaoyuan composes optical poetic games that fluctuate between tranquility and confinement.

Exorcise Me is a video installation across four screens, creating an environment that engulfs the visitor. Teenage girls in school uniforms, death masks painted on their faces, pose with languor and composure. The makeup is in reference to the gothic lexicon of heavy metal while their attitude recalls that of the self- involved young girls painted by Balthus. Adolescence is a particularly intense moment in the exploration of the self. Doubt, anxiety, the search for one’s identity and one’s relationship to the world give way to a discomfort typical of the passage from childhood to adulthood. Through the use of photography, video and sculpture, Sookoon Ang (born in 1977, lives and works in Singapore and France) deals with the question of existence and its uncertain nature. Emotions, daily life and notions of reality and perception are present in her work, making us reconsider our perceptible environment.

Placed at the intersection of history, memory and fantasy, the work of Andro Wekua (born in 1977, lives and works in Berlin) gives rise to a feeling of disquieting eeriness. He presents here a condensed version of his mnemonic investigations with a sculpture, a film and an environment. The three come together in order to create a feeling of claustrophobia, even dread: Untitled (2011), a wax mannequin with its head encapsulated in a house echoes a short film bordering on science fiction, entitled Never Sleep With a Strawberry in Your Mouth II (2010- 2012). In both works someone or something takes possession of your mind. Originally from Georgia in the former USSR—a country he was forced to flee during childhood—Andro Wekua has kept in his work traces of this ‘elsewhere’. His wax figures built to human scale seem to protect themselves from the outside world by the richness of their most intimate thoughts while his paintings refer to the 20th-century avant-garde and his miniature models are memories of the communist architecture of his past.

With his work L’Homme qui tousse (1969), Christian Boltanski (born in 1944, lives and works in Malakoff) turns the viewer into a voyeur, making him witness to a gruesome scene. Produced with limited means, the film presents a modestly dressed man sitting on the floor of a dilapidated room, his body wracked continuously as he coughs up blood that flows over his chest and legs. A metaphor for the inner struggle that inhabits each of us, the work confronts the viewer with our most troubling feelings. A major and internationally renowned figure in contemporary art, Christian Boltanski places individual as well as collective stories at the heart of his work. Film, photography and installation are the tools he uses in his collecting that has taken on an existential character. His work, like monuments dedicated to memories, either fictional or shared, highlights the traumas of the 20th century.

For the exhibition “Inside,” artists Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus (born respectively in 1968 and 1969, live and work in Paris and Marseille) present their installation E.17 Y.40 A.18 C.28 X.40 0.13,5 composed of a series of sculptures based on drawings made by patients during a psychological test in which they were asked to draw a tree. Each drawing channels unconscious determinations from within the patient whose psychological state generates a set of forms and constructions. The three-dimensional materialization of these drawings creates shared and sharable “self- portraits” that we can relate to, from the standpoint of our own histories, traumas and failures.

Berdaguer & Péjus manipulate symptoms of existence such as emotions and pathologies in order to generate forms, revealing the state of the world and the way in which people continuously invent new remedies to adapt to the necessities of their time.

This Nameless Spectacle (2011) is a video installation by Jesper Just (born in 1974, lives and works in New York) consisting in a double projection on two opposing walls. The video shows a woman moving through a park in a wheelchair and what this woman sees. Later in the video, the woman is followed by a young man. An exchange between the two characters at a distance from one another ensues, from two buildings facing each other, creating a sense of puzzlement and unease. What relationship—seductive or predatory—is taking shape between them?

Jesper Just develops a practice that shifts the codes of the moving image and narrative in order to obtain cinematographical experiences on the scale of the exhibition space and the body of the viewer. Playing on the confrontations or dialogues between urban space and the natural landscape, the artist conjures, through the presence of these characters, troubling situations and great sentimental tension.

Le Refuge by Stéphane Thidet (born in 1974, lives and works in Paris) is a wooden cabin, equipped with a few pieces of furniture, similar to those in which mountaineers and hikers might spend the night in the mountains. Yet who would dream of entering this cabin as it’s raining inside? Watching the rainfall through the window doesn’t produce a feeling of pleasure or security. Rather, the viewer is faced here with a reversal of outside and inside, of a refuge turned into a hostile place. The refuge is therefore to be found outside, perhaps within us. Stéphane Thidet manipulates objects and forms, proposing situations through his work. He subverts and disturbs what is familiar, forcing each of us to look at and interrogate reality. The artist knowingly turns our daily experiences and knowledge on their heads in order to interact with our imaginations.

The cathartic animated films and sculptures of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg (born in 1978, live and work in Berlin) make possible a play on fantasies, obsessions and fears. A gigantic sprouting potato ( Potato , 2008) – somewhere between rot and regeneration – inside which three films are projected, forms the core of the installation. Other films, projected on the surrounding walls, show interwoven narratives, whose characters’ extreme appearances are like so many masks worn by the artists but also by the visitors. A primitive force is at work in Nathalie Djurberg’s animated films (with soundtracks courtesy of Hans Berg). The tortured human body – either struggling or in osmosis with the bodies of other creatures – is one of the main subjects of these works that are like an extension of the subconscious. Displaying a very dark sense of humor, the duo reach out to the dark side existing in every one of us through forgotten folklore, touches of animism and references to psychoanalysis.

The inhabitants of a burning house, absorbed by their daily activities, don’t seem to be paying attention to the unfolding drama. In the kitchen, the living room and the bedroom, the flames have taken hold of the furniture while objects are melting from the heat. In this stifling interior, the fire reaches the occupants who – unable to react or refusing reality – begin to burn too. Patrick Jolley (1964 – 2012) and Reynold Reynolds (born in 1966, lives and works in New York and Berlin) paint a worrying portrait of our interiors, inhabited and consumed by fire, paralyzed by denial. The poetic and at the same time macabre representation of dramas and catastrophes is at the heart of the collaboration between Reynold Reynolds and the photographer Patrick Jolley. Their video and photographical installations draw the viewer into frightening scenarios that play on our personal or collective fears of domestic accidents and cataclysms.

Andra Ursuta’s artwork (born in 1979, lives and works in New York) entitled Stoner (2013) deals with violence that occurs against women, notably through stoning. It features a flesh-colored wall strewn with long, black clumps of hair targeted by a machine that normally shoots baseballsthat here have here been replaced by imitation stones. In this darkly humorous work, the artist also makes reference to the archaic tradition of walling living humans in the foundations of new buildings in order to guarantee their durability and to ward off bad luck. Andra Ursuta creates works that draw on her fears and her history. Reacting to crisis situations that she finds in international news stories (domestic violence, terrorist attacks, discovery of mass graves…) she still manages to avoid dealing frontally with horror. Subtly and mysteriously, she brings the visitor face to face with the darker side of humanity.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born in 1957, lives and works in Bangkok) has realized a series of works in which she tends to the dead by reading to them, making conversation or teaching them something. Conversations I-III is a series of five video projections that attest to the moments that the artist has spent in a morgue with unclaimed bodies. Replacing the family and relatives of these “orphaned” corpses, she documents this ultimate gesture of solicitude towards them. With serenity and love, she offers them a moment of reading and singing exclusively intended for them. Through this act of reverence and removal from the intense activity of the world, the artist prolongs the link between life and death.

After receiving academic training, the artist broke away from an object-based practice at the end of the 1990s. At present, she mainly works with video and writing, media that allow her to engage with and reveal sensitive and sometimes taboo subjects.

An important figure of the Polish art scene, Artur Zmijewski studies social behaviors and the relationship between individuals and the group. Video is a means for him of documenting and transmitting his radical experiments, confronting the spectator with the disturbing and unbearable relationships that exist between humans.

Filmed in a gas chamber inside a former concentration camp and in the basement of a house, the film Berek (1999) presents a group of naked adults playing tag. Among them, the feeling of embarrassment and unease sometimes gives way to laughter. Artur Zmijewski (born in 1966, lives and works in Warsaw) doesn’t impose a script on the participants in his filmic experiments. Rather he takes the position of an observer of social mechanisms and of our relationship to history. To occupy a place of collective traumatism with play is akin, for the artist, to therapy and exorcism. Where the need for remembrance and commemoration are not always sufficient, man returns to the place of trauma, the better to free himself from it.

Get Out of my Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), a sound installation by Bruce Nauman (born in 1941, lives and works in New Mexico), offers visitors an immersive experience bordering on claustrophobia. This work, presented at the end of the labyrinthine tour through the exhibition Inside, enables the visitor to free himself from the troubling images seen previously in the exhibition, all the while allowing him to retreat into his own thoughts. Of great intensity, this work takes the viewer hostage while simultaneously liberating him. For over forty years, Bruce Nauman has been a major figure in contemporary art. His extremely polymorphous work deals with the human condition in all its contradictions. Placing body language, among others, at the center of his preoccupations, the artist allows the visitor a great deal of self-awareness in his relationship to himself and to others, at times with considerable violence.

The installation Aõ (1981), a work by Tunga (born in 1952, lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and Paris), consists in a 16-millimeter film projection that spreads out into the room. The unspooling of the film creates a large ring on the floor, resulting in both a cinematographical and spatial device. On the screen, a shot of a few seconds filmed around a bend inside the Dois Irmaõs tunnel in Rio is projected in a loop. This repetition creates the impression of a never-ending journey that is amplified by another repetition, a short clip from the song Night and Day by Frank Sinatra. The illusion of an infinite progression seems to bring time and space to a standstill. This loop, producing an impression of cyclical time, is in opposition to a continuous and infinite conception of time.

Repetition and looping are recurrent in Tunga’s work. The objects and materials used are subverted from their intended function and poetically deliver metaphysical interrogations about our contemporary world. All of the artist’s works answer one another, and they create powerful physical and psychological tensions.

In 2013, Jean-Michel Alberola (born in 1953, lives and works in Paris) created La Salle des instructions, a room in the Palais de Tokyo that he transformed into a waiting room and conversation space presenting mural paintings that featured vivid colors and writing. Different sentences leap out at the viewer like injunctions. “The exit is inside” is one example. The artist has re- imagined this installation specially as the closing piece of the exhibition Inside. Narrative fragment, political or philosophical formula? The meaning of this sentence is left to be freely determined by each visitor. We may leave the exhibition, exit the proposed experience, but Isn’t there a mental continuation persisting inside every one of us? Jean-Michel Alberola has developed a multifarious body of work between figuration and abstraction, with painting featuring most prominently. Composed of formal fragments, it expresses a number of social and political concerns while questioning its own role and that of the artist.