The History of Tears

Bourse de commerce - Pinault Collection

Pinault Collection presents in the Rotunda and the twenty-four display cases of the Bourse de Commerce an exhibition by the American artist Barbara Kruger, "The History of Tears." Conceived specifically for the Rotunda and the museum's display cases, Barbara Kruger's exhibition "The History of Tears" confronts visitors with an uninterrupted flow of words, phrases and injunctions, filmed sequences and voices. At the heart of the museum, Tadao Ando's curved walls become the support for monumental quotations drawn in particular from the literary works 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1947) by Aimé Césaire, while the twenty-four display cases of the Passage, transformed into light boxes, punctuate the space with striking injunctions written by Barbara Kruger (born 1945). Two videos are woven into this ensemble, now reinstalled in this new arrangement. Made and edited by the artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (United States), Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust was first presented in 1996 before being shown on several occasions in different contexts, always linked to a textual environment. The works confront the visitor with a succession of faces, gazes and words in which desire, domination, fear and violence intermingle. Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Barbara Kruger composes a total work in which the intimate and the political, the body and language, collide in a hypnotic whirlwind whose scope resonates today with striking acuity. "An endless deluge from the eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust. A reservoir that fills through domination and conquest, on a global scale as much as on a domestic one. A fountain that gushes forth in moments of great violence and brutality, but also at the heart of the most intimate cruelties. It can be triumphalist in its scale, or drizzle down, like a petty melodrama dotted with caricatures of grotesque seduction and rejection. It is a bodily production both remembered and forgotten. It is a body in tears, lost amid the rubble of battles fought over money, land, love and other bodies. Mapping this emotional fountain, situating it within its historical context, leads one to speak of the deep struggle between the powerful and the dispossessed, the loved and the unloved, the winners and the losers. It reveals shame, pride, conviction and doubt in a manner that is intensely menacing and tragically comic. It can show us and tell us how we were, how we are, and how we will be toward one another." — Barbara Kruger, on "The History of Tears." Curatorship: Matthieu Humery, photography advisor to Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, project manager.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗