Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in 1961 in Nice. He lives and works in Sète, France. His works, which have been exhibited in contemporary art spaces for the last thirty years, both in France and abroad, should be seen primarily as those of a musician.
After being the composer for author and director Pascal Rambert’s company Side One—Posthume Théâtre from 1985 to 1994, Boursier-Mougenot began to give an independent form to his music by creating installations. Starting with the most diverse situations and objects, from which he extracts their musical potential, he develops systems that extend the notion of a musical score to the most heterodox configurations of the materials and media he uses to generate, usually as a live performance, forms of sound that he describes as alive. Created in resonance with the architectural and environmental features of the exhibition space, each system provides the ideal framework for a listening experience that, offered up to the visitor’s eyes and ears, reveals the process that generates the
music.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, Galerie Xippas in Paris, Geneva, Montevideo, and Athens, and the Mario Mazzoli Gallery in Berlin and Modena. His work has been exhibited at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2009, the Barbican Centre in London in 2010, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 2013, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2015, SFMoMA in San Francisco in 2017, the Hab Galerie for Le Voyage à Nantes in 2018, for the inauguration of the Arter Museum of the Vehbi Koç Foundation in Istanbul in 2019, and for the opening of the new museum of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Langfang, China in 2021.
