This discussion will take place in English.

In conjunction with the exhibition “Champs Elysées,” the Palais de Tokyo brings together for the first time artist Tom Holmes (Liberty, Tennessee) and Hollywood Forever Cemetery Director Tyler Cassity (Los Angeles, California).

Tom Holmes is an American artist whose work was recently presented in a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern. In “Champs Elysées”, his work “Untitled Plot (milk, gold tinsel)” (2012), an installation composed of four concrete moulds of milk jugs linked by a Christmas garland, suggests the last moment preceding a burial. Since his first exhibition was held in New York in 2009, Holmes has constructed an artistic vocabulary that frequently invokes funerary rites through daily artifacts from consumer culture. Holmes plans on opening his own cemetery and funeral home in Tennessee.

Hollywood Forever is the legendary Los Angeles cemetery where Cecil B. DeMille, Rudolf Valentino and Johnny Ramone are buried, and where numerous film scenes are shot every week. A central figure of the funerary business and a celebrated innovator in the field, Cassity consulted on HBO’s long-running series “Six Feet Under.” He will be talking about his experience of the creation of a cemetery where reality meets fiction and discuss the future of funerary traditions, notably the trend toward eco-friendly practices.

With support of the Fondation des Services Funéraires de la ville de Paris, Hollywood Forever (Los Angeles) and Bureau (New York).