BUENOS AIRES.- The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the CCK—a cultural institution under the authority of the Sistema Federal de Medios y Contenidos Públicos of Argentina— are presenting their first collaboration together: Les Visitants. Guillermo Kuitca Reflects on the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Collection. This large-scale exhibition, uniting the two institutions, is an exceptional project that has the support of the French Embassy in Argentina and the Institut français d’Argentine, and brings together works by 23 international artists, from David Lynch to Agnès Varda, Patti Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans or Nobuyoshi Araki, presented in Argentina for the very first time.

To commemorate its thirtieth anniversary, in October 2014, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain asked Guillermo Kuitca to imagine a project, the likes of which had never been done before, building a network between his own work and the works of Tarsila do Amaral, Francis Bacon, Vija Celmins, David Lynch, and Patti Smith, as well as the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, whose film Inhabitants (Les Habitants, in French) lent its name to the exhibition. By plunging visitors into a pictorial and sound environment, the exhibition presented a personal and original look back over the Fondation Cartier’s history, made up of unexpected dialogues and connections between ideas, artists, and artworks.

In 2017, at the invitation of the Sistema Federal de Medios y Contenidos Públicos, Guillermo Kuitca conceives Les Visitants, the second part of the project, through which he gives us his personal take on the Fondation Cartier Collection, presents series of photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki, Alair Gomes, William Eggleston, Seydou Keïta, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Juergen Teller, Patti Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Francesca Woodman, projections and video installations by Jean-Michel Alberola, Rinko Kawauchi, Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Daido Moriyama, Tony Oursler, Agnès Varda, Artavazd Pelechian, a monumental sculpture by Adriana Varejão, several hundred drawings and an inedite series of photographs by filmmaker David Lynch.

This major exhibition is taking place throughout the spaces on the 6th and 7th floors of the CCK, as well as in the two galleries in the “Gran Lámpara” (The Great Lamp). As the heart and meeting point of the whole project, Guillermo Kuitca’s Living room takes up a whole hall of the Gran Lámpara. This installation was inspired by a space imagined by David Lynch, based on one of his own drawings, for his exhibition The Air is on Fire presented at the Fondation Cartier in 2007.

Acting on the sensations and effects of perspective and the resonance between the pieces, the Living room, both theatrical and intimate at the same time, constitutes a red and black pictorial space whose walls are completely covered in angular, prismatic shapes, broken down like variations on a sheet of music—in line with one of the main characteristics of Guillermo Kuitca’s recent work. Inhabited by David Lynch’s furniture-sculptures, the space is also permeated by the voice of Patti Smith, who adapted a text written by the filmmaker in 2011, a long and disturbing poetic fable that tells the story of an antelope which wanders through a city and observes its people. Kuitca draws an imaginary and subjective map, designing a set of echoes, crossings or shortcuts, mental territories or webs of intuition.

In another floor of the Gran Lámpara, swinging between abstraction and the physical present, he conceives different points of convergence between a film by Artavazd Pelechian—an authentic ode to the savageness of nature that shows animals running terrified from an invisible threat—, a series of huge photos from Mathematical Forms by Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a collection of pieces by Francesca Woodman, in which the artist makes her own body center stage in an ever-changing and ghostlike apparition.

By creating links between different aesthetics, Guillermo Kuitca has without a doubt conceived Les Visitants exhibition as an artist, not as a curator. Through his take on the Fondation Cartier Collection, he draws our attention to the key role photography holds within it. By establishing echoes with sculptures, drawings, projections or video installations, he reminds us that the photographic image mingles with other practices, and is made all the richer by that proximity. By being open to a diverse geography, from African to Japanese photography, travelling through Brazil, Europe and the United States, the Fondation Cartier has regularly chosen to acquire whole series of works, and even entire exhibitions. From gallery to gallery, the universes answer one another and begin a correspondence, in a succession of thematic spaces that offer every visitor an unprecedented chance to come face to face with works by world-renowned artists, the majority of whom are showing in Argentina for the very first time. With Les Visitants, Guillermo Kuitca is signing off a singular project with multiple readings, which revisits both the Fondation Cartier’s history and contemporary creation.