L'invitation aux musées
Week-end #1

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia ^{Spain / Madrid}
Laurence Rassel & Mar Villaespesa ^curator

Since the opening of its extension, entrusted to Jean Nouvel, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía has become one of the largest museums in the world, containing over 20,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art, from 1900 to today. Aimed at revalorising the work and visibility of Spanish artists, its collection brings together pieces by the most famous of them (Miró, Dalí, Gris, Tàpies, Oteiza…), including Picasso’s famous Guernica, as its priceless jewel. But it also sets them in a more general landscape of modernity and avant-gardes, while also bringing in major pieces by international artists, such as Picabia, Dubuffet, Bacon, Rothko, Flavin or Pistoletto. The adventure that it sketches out has clearly been marked by the will to think through at once artistic creation, and a feeling of rebellion, articulated accordingly around the cardinal themes of utopia, war or postmodern criticism. For the Invitation to Museums, the CN D asked the curator Laurence Rassel to invest its spaces. Known and renowned for having placed the question of the critical uses of technologies, networks and archives at the centre of her preoccupations, she has in particular been the curator with Mar Villaespesa of Todas las variaciones son válidas, incluida esta, a retrospective of Esther Ferrer, the pioneer of Spanish performance, which was held in 2017 at the Palacio de Velázquez, under the aegis of the Museo Reina Sofía. She currently directs the school of graphic research in Brussels (ERG). Mar Villaespessa has been an independent curator since the 1980s. She has founded and edited various magazines and publications. She organises seminars and exhibitions, and has for many years worked with the International University of Andalusia.
 

Musée éphémère de la mode ^{France / Paris}
Olivier Saillard ^curator

Recently brought to life in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, based on collections from the Galerie du Costume et de la Mode, the Ephemeral Museum of Fashion intends, at its own level, to make up for the rarity of institutions devoted to textile creations. Launched on the initiative of Olivier Saillard, performer, historian and former director of the Palais Galliera, the project stands out thanks to the inventiveness of its hanging, which has been thought out so as to run up against academia and institutional museums. Its presentation thus breaks away both from rankings and chronologies, so as to think out a dramaturgy with a direct contact with the site that hosts it. The costumes and accessories are not just associated according to their chromatic affinities or the closeness of their materials, but also, and above all, in a way which is often intuitive, with no claim to establishing a reasoned order. Thanks to a scenography which is as elegant as it is unexpected, this mobile museum is an invitation to a journey of a totally new sort that remodels our relationship with clothes and the way we look at them. So it is that the Ephemeral Museum of Fashion introduces an exhibition time that completely breaks away from the frenzied pace of catwalks, to provide the pieces with the chance to be contemplated patiently, if not attentively. With this itinerant project, unlike any other, Olivier Saillard is attempting to give an original solution to the equation opposing the fugitive nature of fashion to the permanence of heritage collections, thus producing a kind of synthesis between the fleeting and the eternal.

Art Institute of Chicago ^{USA / Chicago}
Hendrik Folkerts ^curator

Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago, with over 300,000 pieces, hosts the largest permanent collection in the USA, and is known worldwide for its impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces (by Renoir, Van Gogh or Monet). Already one of the largest cultural sites in the country, the museum expanded the space devoted to its collections of modern and contemporary art in 2009, with the addition of The Modern Wing, entrusted to Renzo Piano. Thanks to it, the museum has affirmed its will to adopt a view that transcends fine art, in particular by bringing in photography, architecture, the decorative arts, the creation of textiles and design. Both trans-historical and multi-disciplinary, the museum’s collections create a dialogue between one another, and the cultures of the entire world (African, American, Amerindian, European and Asian), or between endemic traditions and vernacular objects, including Anasazi terracotta, Middle-Eastern armour, Egyptian sarcophaguses, Chinese ceramics, or else the famous Thorne Miniature Rooms. After being serving as curator for documenta 14 or at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where he also coordinated the De Appel programme, Hendrik Folkerts joined the team of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. He is in charge of organising exhibitions and performance cycles, as well as the setting-up of partnerships and international projects.