In today’s fast-paced world, it is essential to maintain clear, sustainable working axes that have been developed over the long term and which are based on what in art brings us together: freedom and diversity of forms, the transformative power of creation, beauty and poetry in the face of division. These perspectives take shape around the enduring links between artists and societal issues, but are also nourished by an ongoing attention to ecology, new narratives of the world, the missing images of history and the reparative functions of art.

After all, if art can act as a stimulating vector of consciousness and awareness, it is also a workshop for transformation, a construction site, a provider of solutions. A space that is not just reactive but active. A fertile platform where artists can tell other stories, imagine other relationships and invent other scenarios for us and for the world.

It is this construction of possibilities that runs throughout the different projects that make up the rich autumn 2024 programme at the Palais de Tokyo. It features a multitude of visions and of voices that approach the present by way of allies in the past, convoking and invoking enduring ancestral bonds and benevolent ghosts, and making visible absent yet powerful figures. Revisiting history by broadening it, creating transgenerational connections, and in so doing healing the links to our immediate environments, intimate or collective, human or non-human, familial or historical. Coming to terms with insistent pains by way of presence, power and protection. Learning from forgotten or neglected practices or knowledges. So many invitations to widen our gaze and sharpen it at the same time. So many invitations to see differently, further, deeper, and more intensely, through the sensitive, the evanescent, and even through the invisible.

Driven, as we always have been, by a desire to present the ecosystem of contemporary creation in all its richness, the programme features many artists who have never before exhibited their work on so large a scale and with such visibility, and others who have never previously shown their work in France. We are proud to be able to do so and mindful of the privileged space that the Palais de Tokyo can offer to this profusion of talent.

This season features six exhibitions alongside an extensive cultural programme, workshops and outreach events for all audiences that unfold across all the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. In this way, we hope to embody the powerful proposal which, by foregrounding lessons from the past to better shape the present, is preparing for the future – one in which this season’s artists have planted the seeds of patience and of hope.

We invite you to join us in welcoming this future, and hope you enjoy your visit to the Palais de Tokyo.