L'invitation aux musées

Six artistic sites from the entire world transform the CN D into a living ephemeral museum

Taking on more than ever its project of being an artistic dance centre, the CN D is inviting six art sites from around the world to transform it into a living, ephemeral museum. Open to all the fields of art, the CN D has become one of the nerve centres for the breaking down of barriers between disciplines, thanks to its heteroclite programming (mingling shows, performances, exhibitions, concerts, talks by artists, projections, clubbing, or cabaret shows) and the opening of an exhibition gallery amid its spaces. This new initiative thus extends and supports its move towards openness, while reaffirm even more its ambition to conjugate plural creations, while setting itself up as a truly hybrid stage.

The point is perhaps also to make amends for a moment of impoliteness. While the previous century, with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, invited Bakst, Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picasso or Chirico to collaborate with choreographers, the 21^st century has witnessed this trend being quite clearly reversed, with museums setting themselves up as power bases promoting dance. Xavier Le Roy, Boris Charmartz, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker or else Jérôme Bel, to name but a few, thus regularly invest exhibition spaces throughout the world, invited to reinvent approaches to putting on shows in extra-stage arrangements. It was thus high time to switch this invitation around and recover a tradition of hospitality towards living art forms.

The partners were chosen for the singularity of their cultural projects, the richness of their collections or their actions in terms of performance, without establishing any ranking between institutions with an international outreach (the Chicago Art Institute, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, or Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea), art centres marked by their originality (the MAGASIN des horizons) and other projects with more singular profiles (the Musée de la Danse, the Ephemeral Museum of Fashion). Each of them then delegates its project to a reference curator, recognised for their commitment to the field of performance arts – Hendrik Folkerts, Béatrice Josse, Cristina Grande, Laurence Rassel and Mar Villaespesa – or who have sometimes been involved in previous collaborations with the CN D – such as Olivier Saillard, or Boris Charmatz. This invitation to museums provides them with the opportunity to shake up their habits, break with the rationales of conservation and get around the constraints of the white cube exhibition space. They are asked to imagine on site, in the building in Pantin, an exhibition form which still remains to be invented, to which should be added a performative event and a scientific intervention.

Taking hold of the idea of an art exhibition, giving works the means to acquire a living embodiment and thinking through the sharing of all forms of visual art, such will be the guiding lights of these weekends of creative effervescence. It is now up to museums to enter into the dance.