The urgency of current events and the intensity of the present must not incapacitate us but rather encourage us to redouble our efforts to fulfil our goals, in particular that of amplifying alternative voices above the chaos. Together with artists, we must continue to create, invent, and explore, refusing to choose between intelligence and beauty, between the real and the poetic, between hope and lucidity. We must find ways to remain in love with art and with its fundamental contradictions, akin to a kind of quantum leap. In other words, we must strive to embrace two opposite states, to be at once insufficient and essential, compromised and free, trivial and sublime. We must find ways to remain in love with this strange, living, irreconcilable and subversive thing that continues to struggle within and against all forms ofdeterminism, always ready to work upon our imaginations.

This unique energy animates the Palais de Tokyo through a programme that is closely attuned to contemporary ideas, forms and ways of making. It is a paradoxical energy, at once a dazzling flash of lightning and a sustainable direct current, and whose charge can be felt throughout the new season of exhibitions and events which, in a twist on the usual programming cycle, will extend through to the summer.In all its diversity, this mosaic of singular projects traces out a series of motifs that enter into resonance with contemporary world events both societal and geopolitical: the social and political role of artistic creation, experiences of war and exile, questions of mental health, empathy and solidarity.

These motifs and affective states are approached through productive tensions: utopias that tear through crowded skies, fatigue which awakens spaces of rest that can actively resist, desire in the face of violence. Reparative practices in a ruined world, the possibility of searching out the future in the past and finding coordinates in history’s blind spots. Echoes which never repeat one another and perspectives that appear in the night.

They constitute so many homages as to the power of art and its capacity to be with, against, besides, behind, below, and above the real… as well as in the thick of it.

Enjoy your visit.