Echoing the institutional permaculture that the Palais de Tokyo has been developing in recent years, this season of exhibitions has taken shape around the idea of “territory” and all the many meanings of the term. As entities at once concrete and symbolic, territories are increasingly the subject of critical work by geographers and artists alike.

The idea of territory is at the heart of the exhibition “You and Your Gang”, which brings together some of the artistic practices and spaces that have flourished in rural spaces across France over the past few years. These initiatives blend art, activism and social practices to act as spaces for creation, programming, residencies and research. In interaction with the specific geographies and
histories of the sites in which they are anchored, and drawing on ecological questions, they upturn the clichés surrounding rurality, which is too often defined by what it is not, or in terms of its supposed dependence on urban areas.

This season also features three solo exhibitions by major artists whose work has yet to be shown extensively in France: Valérie John, Sonia Gomes and Rose Lowder. The first two artists share an interest in craft practices that place an emphasis on materiality, in ways that are always deeply rooted in the cultures and the histories of the territories in which they work: Brazil for Sonia Gomes, Martinique and Senegal for Valérie John. Rose Lowder has meanwhile been using 16mm film to transfigure details of the natural world for more than fifty years, with precision and poetry in equal measure.

This season also approaches territory as a symbolic and political space shaped by authority with an invitation to French-Lebanese artist Ali Cherri. Two further discoveries complete this fertile landscape: the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to Ivorian photographer Paul Kodjo, in partnership with the Rencontres d’Arles, and an exhibition by Céleste Richard-Zimmermann, 2026 laureate of the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo.