CONSUMER, Salon 1.618 – Palais de Tokyo

Curator: Lauranne Germond – COAL

With :
A constructed world, Anne Durez, Camille Goujon, Claire Morgan, Donna Conlon and Jonathan Harker, Eva Meyer-Keller, Young-Hae Chang Heavy industries, Kristof Kintera, Lucie Chaumont, Maria Thereza Alves, Marie Denis, Marie Velardi, Mark Dion, Nicolas Milhé, Pascal Bircher, Philippe Terrier-Hermann, Yang Zhenzhong

1.618 places contemporary creation at the heart of its event, with the exhibitionConsumer, which offers visitors a new vision and understanding of the problems of today’s world.

Its curator is Lauranne Germond (Member of Coal). It gathers about fifteen international artists, confirmed or emerging, who have made sustainable development issues one of the axes of their creation.

Consumer, the title of the exhibition, offers two possible readings, one French, the other Anglo-Saxon (consumer). Consume and consume are paronyms and were for a long time one and the same word. To consume was progressively understood in its positive acceptation: to acquire, to use, or to lead a thing to the end of its accomplishment; to the point of making us forget its original root: to destroy, to reduce to ashes, to exhaust until its last forces. Consumer by its double meaning questions the validity of a system built on pure consumption and sends us back to our individual and collective responsibilities as to the passive acceptance of our consumer condition.

Consumer maps the new challenges of sustainable development and consumption. By the diversity of the subjects tackled, by the multitude of approaches, by the sometimes antagonistic points of view of the artists exposed, Consumer lays the groundwork for a sensitive reflection on the urgent need to invent a new, more responsible form of consumption and to reconsider our relationship with nature, technology and modernity.

Consumer also offers visitors a selection of artists’ videos, which will be shown in the Palace’s screening room as well as on the new Souvenirs From Earth video art cable television channel.

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