The French Ministry of Culture and Communication has invited Okwui Enwezor to serve as artistic director of La Triennale. The flagship event, marking the reopening of the Palais de Tokyo in 2012, proposes a large panorama of contemporary art at the intersection of the French art scene and global sites of production. Beginning within the interiors of the expanded and refurbished Palais de Tokyo, La Triennale is set in a series of overlapping cartographies that shift from small-scale collaborations with emerging research, production, exhibition, and performance spaces in Paris and the surrounding suburb, to explorations of the critical valences between the edges of France and countries adjacent to and bordering them.
Fundamentally, the goal of the project is to shift from the idea of national space, as a constituted physical location, to a frontier space that constantly assumes new morphologies and new models of categorization (local, national, trans-national, geo-political, denational, pure, contaminated, etc.).
Recently appointed director of Munich’s Haus der Kunst, Okwui Enwezor has served as artistic director of Documenta 11 in Kassel, and the biennials of Johannesburg, Seville and Gwangju. He was Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President of the San Francisco Art Institute (2005-2009), and is widely acknowledged as a leading and influential figure on the contemporary art scene. As artistic director of La Triennale, Okwui Enwezor brings incisive critical insight, international awareness and extensive practical experience. After La Force de l’Art1 and 2 at the Grand Palais in 2006 and 2009, the newly-reinvented La Triennale will be one of the major art events of 2012.
Artistic Director Enwezor proposes a broad, stimulating panorama of contemporary art. Aiming to explore potential areas of dialogue between various artistic disciplines and cultural scenes, he will work in close collaboration with a team of four associate curators: Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard and Claire Staebler.
The four associate curators of La Triennale are all active and committed actors on the contemporary art scene, each contributing their own, highly original approach. The team offers a rich spectrum of diverse professional experience, dedicated to the shaping and production of a genuinely international, multi-disciplinary event.
Mélanie Bouteloup is co-founder and director of Bétonsalon, a non-profit association established in 2003, now a fully-fledged centre for the arts and research. Working to promote the sharing of knowledge and expertise between different artistic disciplines, Bouteloup has developed Bétonsalon into a place of innovative artistic reflection, research, and exploration rooted in the ecology of contemporary art.
Abdellah Karroum is a curator and founder of L’appartment 22, a unique exhibition and research laboratory based in Rabat. Other projects include the art publisher Hors’champs, and Le Bout Du Monde. Karroum has served as curator of the Dakar, Gwangju and Marrakech biennials in 2006, 2008 and 2009 respectively.
Émilie Renard is a writer and independent curator. Her work explores the structures of fiction and fictional characters in contemporary art forms, with a particular focus on the resurgence of the Arcadian myth. She was co-director of the Paris curator-run space Public, and co-editor of the art magazine and catalogue for fictive shows Trouble.
Claire Staebler was a curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 2002 to 2007, and was artistic director of the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kiev (Ukraine) from 2007 to 2009. She was associate curator of the Busan Biennale in 2006, and is a cofounder with Jelena Vesic of the art project No More Reality [Crowd, Performance and Re-enactment] presented in Belgrade, Amsterdam and Istanbul.
‘La Triennale is happening at a point in which the vitality of contemporary art around France and Paris is immense. The surrounding landscape is not only the landscape of big institutions and powerful structures, but a landscape that is being constructed as we speak by multiple voices and a lot of them emerging voices, not in contestation of the powerful institutions but really enlarging the rise of the possible in Paris. La Triennale is not an exhibition that is about bringing something Paris has not seen before but it is about being part of this developing and growing narrative in a space that has been a primary institution over the past ten years, in terms of different methodologies of exhibition making, the discursive as well as the critical dimensions between art and thought, art and life. Most importantly, La Triennale wants to create a space of intellectual generosity.’ Okwui Enwezor, in conversation with Alfredo Jaar, Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 16 February 2011.
La Triennaleis organized at the initiative of the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Direction Générale de la Création Artistique, commissioner, with the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), associate commissioner, and produced by Palais de Tokyo. La Triennale is organised with the support of the Institut Français.
Photo by: Salah M. Hassan.