Appointment of Guillaume Désanges as President of the Palais de Tokyo
On the proposal of Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin, Minister of Culture, the President of the Republic has decided to appoint Guillaume Désanges President of the Palais de Tokyo.
Guillaume Désanges is an exhibition curator and art critic.
At the beginning of his career, he worked at the Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers and the La Tôlerie art centre in Clermont-Ferrand. He then founded the production structure Work Method, before being a guest curator at the Centre d’art Le Plateau-Frac Ile-de-France where he developed, between 2009 and 2011, an exhibition program entitled «Erudition concrète». He has organized numerous exhibitions at major French and international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, the SMAK in Ghent, Performa in New York, or the Santa Monica Art Center in Barcelona. He has also signed the artistic programme of La Verrière – Fondation d’entreprise Hermès in Brussels since 2013 and the artistic direction of the Salon de Montrouge in 2022. Co-curator of the 8th Louvain-La-Neuve Biennale, he developed an original practice of conferences and performances such as «Une histoire de la performance en 20 minutes» or «Vox Artisti», as well as workshops and residencies (The Method Room in Chicago, since 2014 in particular).
Guillaume Désanges imagines the Palais de Tokyo as a «living body», in the sense of a space of active and reactive creation, constantly evolving, open to a great diversity of contemporary creation and listening to the issues of society. In a collaborative approach, it intends to develop partnerships with a network of Parisian institutions, regional and international, but also art schools, places of residence or with the CNAP. Like the practice of «permaculture», it proposes a «reasoned sharing» of space and time, alternating exhibition spaces and «wastelands» which can accommodate further artistic research or experimentation and new opportunities for encounters with the public.
The programming it proposes will alternate monographs, transdisciplinary thematic exhibitions, foreign seasons (inviting the artistic scene of a city or country to the spotlight), portraits of major international contemporary figures and mini-worksexposures activated flexibly according to the news. Faithful to the multidisciplinary DNA of the Palais de Tokyo, this program will mix contemporary art, cinema, fashion, architecture, design, performance, contemporary music and will open to comics, graphics, video games, science fiction… In addition, he plans to organize every two years a large participatory event outside the walls, both festive and educational.
Guillaume Désanges succeeds Emma Lavigne whose Roselyne Bachelot-Narquin wishes to salute the quality of the work accomplished and the ability to renew the audiences of the Palais de Tokyo, despite a period marked by the upheavals of the pandemic.
*Photo Captation: Guillaume Désanges en 2016. (Jean-Luc Flémal/BELPRESS/MAXPPP)
*Source: Press Release, www.culture.gouv.fr, 10.01.2022, Paris
