Remember Me

Bourse de commerce - Pinault Collection

As the invention of photography celebrates its bicentennial, Pinault Collection presents a major group exhibition bringing together around 700 works by more than 70 artists at the Bourse de Commerce. Entitled « Remember Me », in reference to an original work by Barbara Kruger that occupies the Rotonde of the museum, the exhibition offers a tribute to the photographic medium. Through masterpieces and icons of the Collection Pinault, the journey resembles a fugue: a free traversal, without chronology, that allows for unexpected correspondences, dialogues between genres and eras, offering visitors a sensitive and open experience of the history of photography. From heritage photography to contemporary imagery, from Gustave Le Gray to Cindy Sherman, from Dorothea Lange to Wolfgang Tillmans, passing through Man Ray or Louise Lawler, the Collection Pinault embraces the entire history of the photographic medium. It also reflects all its aesthetics and techniques. Presenting it in its entirety on the occasion of the bicentennial of the invention of photography carries a certain evidence. Through a selection of around seven hundred works, this is what the exhibition « Remember Me » does for the first time, its title resonating in a thousand ways. « Among objects that maintain a particular relationship with memory, photography today occupies a very special place. In 1827, this process was first praised for its ability to reproduce reality with unprecedented fidelity. Yet it would very quickly prove to be the best material representation of mnesic images, and Charles Baudelaire, as early as 1859, discerned this memorial value. To freeze an instant T, to immortalize a face, to make the ineluctable ephemerality of existence live and survive: this is what photography implies in its essence. Not to forget. To erase the gaps in our memories. To revive and nourish our history by outwitting death. For if an evocation is by nature evanescent, a photograph, on the contrary, remains. Like a paper relic, photography celebrates both the present and allows us to contemplate what was but is no longer. » — Matthieu Humery, photography advisor, Pinault Collection

Source: Paris Open Data ↗