PARIS.- Galerie Perrotin presents "DECADE, Portrait d’une génération," an exhibition by JR that simultaneously occupies the first level at the rue de Turenne and impasse Saint-Claude spaces in Paris.

This new exhibition, JR’s fifth since he joined the Gallery in 2011, covers the work of the last ten years. It features a selection of his videos, ink on wood pieces, and recent photographs.

The sequence begins with an immersive installation that takes us into the heart of the Cité des Bosquets in Clichy-Montfermeil, in the suburbs of Paris. This work confronts, as a means to better interconnect the different themes linked by the artist over the last decade.

Using reflections on the floor, projections set up an infinite dialogue between the inhabitants of this housing project, evocations of the riots of 2005, and the destruction of the housing blocks that was part of the political response. The filmed dance offers a link that is both academic and temporal, symbolically uniting the different phases of JR’s work in Clichy-Montfermeil over the last decade.

Diffused through the Gallery space, the looped videos also remind us of the difficulty of describing the formal and temporal locus of those social and political events that shook the whole of France in autumn 2005.

Clichy-Montfermeil was the flashpoint of what political analyst Gilles Képel has described as "the biggest riots in the history of contemporary France." On 27 October 2005, the tragic deaths of Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who were electrocuted when trying to run from the police, marked the beginning of an unprecedented social uprising that started an international media frenzy.

It was in this same territory, a year earlier, that JR had begun what he did not know at the time would become his "Portrait d’une Génération" project. With his filmmaker friend Ladj Ly, a resident of Les Bosquets, he photographed the everyday life of the young residents living in the neighbourhood and then, without authorisation, pasted the resulting images on their buildings. This was the first time in his career he had worked in very large formats.

One of these images shows Ladj Ly surrounded by youths from the housing project, pointing his camera at JR’s lens as if it were a weapon. When the riots broke out a year later, the posters, which had remained on the walls, were suddenly exposed to the world media. Journalists started using them as an illustration of current events, like an ironic mirror of these adolescents’ violence faced with the aggression of the media and of politics.

When they asked JR permission to use his photos, he refused: he was neither a photojournalist nor a spokesman for the Cité des Bosquets. But this situation did prompt him to define a formal approach, the one that prefigured his "28 Millimètres" project as a whole ("Face2Face, 2007", "Women Are Heroes, 2008/2010"), and, later "Wrinkles of the City (2008/2015)"

In 2006 he went back to the Cité. This time he had a 28 mm lens so that he could photograph in vivid detail the young faces of the city. JR then pasted their grimacing portraits in the center of Paris, accompanied by their (given and family) names and full address. Anyone who wanted to could go out to Clichy-Montfermeil and ring at their door.

In this way JR countered the distancing effect of the images used by the media in their handling of the events a year earlier.

Video brought these portraits back to the fore when, in 2012, France’s National Urban Renovation Project (PRU) included the demolition of two blocks in the Cité des Bosquets.

Realising that part of the place’s memory would be lost, JR decided to capture its last moments. Just before the destruction began, he pasted a score of his portraits from 2006 on the interior walls of the apartments. As the building was knocked down, bit by bit, so we see these portraits of a generation collapse on the screen.

In 2014, when invited to produce a work for the New York City Ballet (NYCB), JR persuaded Peter Martins, director of the David Koch Theater, to put on a choreographic piece about the history of Les Bosquets and the riots of 2005. (Part of JR’s work for the NYCB can be seen in Perrotin’s Rue de Turenne space.)

A decade after his first steps in the Cité des Bosquets, JR and the NYCB staged the story of his friend Ladj Ly and of his encounter with a young journalist during the riots. JR asked Lil’ Buck, a young dancer known for his jookin, to play the young Ladj Ly, and to perform a duet with the classical dancer Lauren Lovette, playing the journalist. The ballet "Les Bosquets" premiered in April 2014 with 42 dancers from the NYCB.

It is nearly ten years since the Parisian suburbs were ablaze. JR felt that this form of dance, which was new to him, could be used to evoke the history of a neighborhood and provide the visual link he needed for the documentary work he had just started on those ten years that had gone by since he pasted that first image of Ladj Ly on his building in Les Bosquets. Rather than the initial documentary, what he is showing is a fiction inspired by the reality, with an original sound track by Hans Zimmer, Woodkid, Pharrell Williams and Ben Wallfish.

Reprised by dancers from the Opéra National de Paris on the site of those clashes in 2005, the choreography created for the NYCB has become the central element of the film "Les Bosquets".

Fittingly, this 17-minute film self-produced and directed by JR is being given its French premiere at Espace 93 in Clichy-sous-Bois in September. It is being shown for free and continuously from 5 to 8 pm on Wednesdays and Fridays of the month. In Paris, it is being shown in a loop at Galerie Perrotin’s Saint-Claude space for the entire duration of the exhibition. The dancers of the NYCB are also present in the photographs shown by JR in this exhibition, as well as in the very large and small format works in ink on wood. The ballet corps of the Opéra National de Paris can also be seen, posing delicately in containers ready to be shipped from Le Havre or on the roof of the Opéra Garnier.

Ten years after the riots that shook France to the point that the government declared a state of emergency, the exhibition "DECADE, Portrait d’une génération" demonstrates JR’s capacity to shift the configurations of what is possible. For ten years now this approach has been the formal and aesthetic foundation of his work. It carries echoes of Situationist principles in that it overcomes established boundaries and produces images that are grounded in reality, and bring together art and life.