Consisting exclusively of works from the Pinault Collection that underscore its breadth, vitality, and diversity, the exhibition “Le monde comme il va” (“The World as It Goes”) takes place in all spaces of the Bourse de Commerce, beginning on 20 March 2024.

Featuring a vast selection of works made mainly from the 1980s to the present day, half of which the Pinault Collection is showing for the first time, the exhibition highlights François Pinault’s passionate commitment to contemporary art that directly engages with our era.

In borrowing its title from a philosophical tale by Voltaire, this new exhibition at the Pinault Collection reveals “heightened awareness of the present” of the artist, according to its curator, Jean-Marie Gallais.
Two generations of works share the stage in this exhibition: those made in the 1980s and 1990s, and those created starting in the 2000s.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Kimsooja has been given carte blanche as part of “Le monde comme il va” exhibition. Her installation in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce is both monumental and ethereal: she uses an immense circular mirror placed on the ground to invert the entire architecture of the Bourse de Commerce, and the order of the world with it. Kimsooja is also taking over the 24 display cases in the Passage and the museum's lower level, with works and video installations that address her favourite themes: identity, borders, memory, exile, movement, and weaving.
 
“I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone.”
Kimsooja.


To Breathe Constellation, by Kimsooja, 2024. Photograph courtesy of Pinault Collection.

Since the late 1970s, her work has asserted itself, on the international art scene, as an essential, universal experience. After studying painting in Seoul, she distanced herself from all art teachings and practice, embracing everyday gestures such as sewing to explore the issues of identity, involvement, individual and collective memory, and the individual’s place in the world.

The mirror used to cover the floor of the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce plays a similar role to that of the needle or her body.
 
“The mirror replaces the body, observing and reflecting the other”, she explains. “By using it, our gaze acts like a sewing thread that moves to and fro, entering into the depths of our self and others, reconnecting us to their reality and inner world. A mirror is a fabric woven by own gaze in an ebbing and flowing motion”.(1)

Kimsooja transfigures the architecture into a dizzying, levitating space, an inversion of the world in which the sky in the glass dome becomes a deep abyss, thereby altering our perception of the space and our sense of the gravitation of bodies. She hollows out the architecture and leaves space to generate new sensations and perhaps also the sense that our body acts like the one in Needle Woman (2): an axis that binds the sky to the earth.


To Breathe Constellation, by Kimsooja, 2024. Photograph courtesy of Pinault Collection.

In resonance with the thinking of Tadao Ando and his quest for an architecture of the empty and the infinite, Kimsooja has covered the floor of the Rotunda with a mirror. She thereby, transforms an artwork into something more than just an object, an installation, or an image; it instead, becomes an essential experience. Between appearance and disappearance, contemplation and astonishment, light-headedness and amazement, the thus-transfigured space is no longer, in the words of François Cheng, “an inert presence; it is filled with breaths that connect the world we can see to the one we cannot”.The mirror that Kimsooja offers us also moulds the space into a gathering, the possibility of a totality that invites us all to create a world together.

In the performance in 1997 that made her famous, she spent eleven days travelling across Korea perched atop a lorry loaded with bottaris, the traditional, shimmering Korean fabric bundles used to mark major events in people’s lives, from birth to marriage to death. As a nomadic artist, Kimsoojametaphorically uses her own body like an anonymous, almost invisible presence whose immobility and verticality become a kind of needle that threads through the fabric of the world.



For the first time, Kimsooja will screen her complete series of 16mm films titled Thread Routes in the Auditorium at the Bourse de Commerce, starting on 20 March. In six chapters, all were filmed in different regions of the world, the artist creates a cultural mosaic around fabrics in which human relations, gestures, artisanal know-how, architecture, nature, and agriculture all become interwoven. Part documentary and part visual anthropology, Thread Routes highlights weaving and its metaphor as a contribution to the world. This cycle of films forms an epic poem based on gestures both minimal and virtuous, as seen by Kimsooja.

NOTES.-
1. Oliva Maria Rubio, Entretien avec Kimsooja, 2006, in Kimsooja, catalogue for the exhibition at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain—Saint-Étienne Métropole, 2012, p. 76, éd. Silvana Editoriale.
2. See Kimsooja, A Needle Woman, 1999–2000 (page 7).

More information

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Artist
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Curators
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Jean-Marie Gallais, Curator at the Pinault Collection.
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Exhibition Design
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Cécile Degos
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From 20 March to 02 September 2024.
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2, rue de Viarmes. 75001 Paris, France.
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Kimsooja (Born 1957, Taegu, Korea). Kimsooja is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who travels between her three homes and places of work in New York City, Paris, and Seoul. In 1980 Kim graduated with a B.F.A in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and continued her M.F.A. there, obtaining the degree in 1984 at 27 old.

is one of the most recognized Korean artists in the international art scene. She currently lives and works in New York, Paris and Seoul. Her work has been extensively exhibited in Asia, the USA and Europe and developed through installations, photography, performances and videos. The artist explores themes such as Nomadism, the relationship between self and others, the roles of women in the world and the importance of human beings in today's chaotic world, their loneliness and transience.

During the Nineties, Kimsooja created special objects and installations and used sewing as a metaphor and an activity in itself. The materials used and how she arranges them originate from the uses of fabrics in Korean tradition; for instance, “Bottari”, bundles of old clothing made with traditional Korean bed covers. Also At the end of the Nineties Kimsooja released a series of video performance pieces produced in different places around the world, with the common denominator being the stationary feminine figure. Fabrics, especially bed covers, light sequences, sound, the chants of Tibetan, Gregorian and Islamic monks and her breathing are just some of the resources she employs and has come to identify her work. Her pieces appear shrouded in silence, works that aspire to isolation, devotion and the use of exhibition space as a sanctuary.

Kimsooja has exhibited his work at the Kunsthalle Vienna, the MoMA in New York and the Palacio de Cristal in El Retiro in the exhibition organized by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, among many other museums and art centres.

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Published on: April 21, 2024
Cite: "Carte blanche to Kimsooja: To Breathe-Constellation, on Bourse de Commerce" METALOCUS. Accessed
<http://www.metalocus.es/en/news/carte-blanche-kimsooja-breathe-constellation-bourse-de-commerce> ISSN 1139-6415
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