From 14 June 2025 to 2 February 2026, in an exceptional collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will be presenting an unusual exhibition dedicated to the creativity of copyists. Copying was central to the classical tradition. Copying the works of great artists is a tool for learning about the canons, techniques and stories. Absorbing their expertise and adopting their mastery is a pathway to knowledge and artistic creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.

A number of artists have received the following invitation from the two curators: ‘Imagine a copy of a work of your choosing from the collections of the Musée du Louvre.’

All eras, from antiquity to the 19^th century, mingle in a fluid layout, whose exhibition design refers to classic forms of museum display, revealing how many different periods coexist at the Louvre.

Even though many great artists, from Matisse to Picasso, copied the works of past artists, modern art seems to have preferred an approach in which the copy was devalued and continuity was replaced by rupture, figuration by abstraction, freehand painting and sketching by an increase in the number of forms possible.

Today, however, it would seem that the issue of the copy is topical once again. Firstly, there has been a return to figuration in contemporary painting and many painters, some of them young, are borrowing motifs from works of the past and giving them new life. Secondly, the nature of the copy is being transformed by digital technology: the image’s multiplication and availability, its abstraction and the absence of a physical medium it a vehicle for copying. Finally, the increase in the creative methods now available have extended the meaning of the copy, ranging from 3D scanning in sculpture, which allows for more precise copies, to video games and the copying of life in the digital world.

The Musée du Louvre and its collections have played a key role in this history of copying, which spans centuries and is also a history of art in the modern period (from the 15th century onwards). The Louvre, ‘a huge book in which we learn to read,’ as Paul Cézanne put it, is the last museum to have a copyists’ bureau, which has been in existence since the institution was created in 1793. It has been and remains central to the practice of copying in France and the West. To mark its two hundredth anniversary, the museum organised a famous exhibition, ‘Copier-Créer’, which highlighted the important role of copying at a time when it was being ideologically called into question.

Copysts was born of a different era, and is an entirely different project : a number of contemporary artists have been invited to make copies at the Musée du Louvre, following in the footsteps of many of their predecessors, both famous and little known. The guests invited to perform this act of decoding, investigation and understanding, juggling old forms and new, include painters, draughtsmen sculptors, video artists, designers and writers. They offer different ways of copying and different conceptions of the copy and of the status of the works exhibited, in a tension between originality and duplication.

This exhibition brings together this form of atistic creation and this heritage, revealing them in a fresh light. Contemporary art does not necessarily seek to break with history but, on the contrary, to draw on it and be enriched by it, to understand it and understand itself. This project, which is both a continuation of history (in the copy’s very form) and radically new (through the works created), is also a meditation on the current state of life. At the same time, it is a mediation on creation, in this ‘unseparated’ world, in which the power of works must contend with with the power of images.

The new NW is inaugurated with the opening exhibition Ritual in Transfigured Time, named after the 1946 short film of the same name by Maya Deren (Kiev, 1917–New York, 1961). Deren, whose life was driven by a desire for freedom, was a guiding light for us in devising the exhibition and film programme, as well as the principles of our revitalised organisation: dialogue, collaboration, experiment and the breaking down of boundaries. Many of life’s changes are accompanied by rituals. Rituals help us to navigate liminal phases, the moments between two positions or roles. At the momentary threshold between the old and new NW, we celebrate this radical metamorphosis. Here, in this place, we invite artists to scrutinise, face up to and recreate realities, whether through enchantment or resistance. For Deren, transformation meant treading both paths: dance as poetic self-expression and as a form of liberation. The exhibition opens with Deren’s 16mm film Ritual in Transfigured Time. The film is a ‘documentary of the inner self’, as the artist herself described it. In Deren’s view, ritual dance brought about a ‘depersonalisation’, where the dancer, supported by the community, could be liberated from social and cultural limitations. In this work, the dancing body assumes the space to experience suppressed freedoms once more without limit, to escape from the oppression of the everyday.

Gaëlle Choisne presents a tear-shaped stage and a film made together with dancer Kettly Noël and guitarist Daniele Morelli following the principles of improvisation and transfiguration. Carlotta Bailly-Borg presents an installation with sandblasted glass doors referring to the notion of the momentary threshold, as well as a series of paintings of timeless, forward- flowing figures. Onyeka Igwe interweaves colonial archive footage with her own visual language in an attempt to reclaim Black dance from the colonial project. Ula Sickle explores the concept of a ‘cinematic camera’ in recordings of dance rehearsals for her performance Holding Present, which was a collaboration with Ictus, the Brussels-based ensemble for contemporary music. Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca show how Frevo, a traditional Brazilian dance, places the self-representation and autonomy of the dancer first. Darius Dolatyari-Dolatdoust treats the costume like a score that grants the performer a new sensory perception of their body. (LA)HORDE offers a contemporary take on dance as ritual within the context of music festivals, collective joy and mass consumption. None of the artworks in this opening exhibition use spoken language; instead, it is only the body that speaks. Under circumstances where speaking becomes pressured or even impossible, artists have been known to find other ways to open doors and let in the unknown.

Authors: Godart Bakkers, Laura Herman

Gaëlle Choisne will present the Frankfurt debut of her long-term project “Temple of Love” (2018-ongoing) and transform the historic Villa 102 into an art space. A meticulous collector of objects acting at the margins of photography, the artist weaves individual memories with social observations to create eclectic installations, videos and performances. Drawing on her personal history and French-Haitian heritage, Choisne’s works often delve into themes of self-healing, spirituality and social interaction. Choisne regards her artistic practice as part of a network of ideas and people, frequently engaging in collaborations and integrating literary and scholarly allusions into her work. For the “To Hide” edition of the long-term project “Temple of Love”, the artist once again refers to a chapter from Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”. The site-specific installation takes on a new form with each presentation. Choisne developed the exhibition for the first time during her one-year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, in cooperation with KfW Stiftung.

The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles is delighted to present Van Gogh’s famous “cosmic poem” Starry Night (Arles, September 1888), one of the masterpieces in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay. The arrival of this key work in Arles, just a few metres from where it was made, provides an opportunity to produce an exhibition that sheds new light on both the sources the artist drew on to create it and its enormous influence.

The exhibition Van Gogh and the Stars, curated by Jean de Loisy and Bice Curiger, takes into consideration the unique climate of the second half of the nineteenth century, both in terms of literature and science. Both artists and thinkers of the day influenced the popularity of astronomy, which spread notably through literary works by the likes of Victor Hugo and Jules Verne; at the same time, painters such as Jean-François Millet, Camille Corot, and James McNeill Whistler were fascinated by the effects of the night, the clear light of the stars, and knowledge of the cosmos.

Intellectuals of this period used words and images to illustrate their new discoveries – copies of astronomer Camille Flammarion’s writings, for example, sold in the hundreds of thousands in the time leading up to the creation of Van Gogh’s night scenes. Such discoveries were popularised by magazines that were hugely influential. Science fiction and bold metaphysical hypotheses added mystery and thrills to the craze and contributed greatly to the climate in which Vincent van Gogh’s nocturnal works were born.

The exhibition presents some of the research that fascinated the public of the time, including the work of great scientific illustrators such as Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and Lord Ross’s drawings of spiral galaxies which so resemble those of Van Gogh. This movement and the colours of the night were augmented by the advent of urban lighting, whose glow and reflections punctuate the famous view of the Rhône.

The influence of this nocturnal scene has been considerable, as shown in the work of subsequent artists such as Edvard Munch, Augusto Giacometti, Robert Delaunay, František Kupka, Kasimir Malevitch, Georgia O’Keeffe, Helen Frankenthaler and other major figures who are featured in the exhibition.

Van Gogh’s examination of the stars, however, is just as remarkable – we know that he studied them meticulously by the precise arrangement of the constellations in his paintings. In a letter to his brother Theo in July 1888, he imagines the stars as the refuge of the dead. This belief, which features prominently in para-scientific literature from the mid-nineteenth century, also influenced Van Gogh’s contemporaries, such as Akseli Gallen-Kallela, Odilon Redon, James Ensor, Wenzel Hablik, and Constantin Ciurlionis. A fascination with the night has persisted in contemporary art, where it has taken different forms. Works by Tony Cragg, Alicja Kwade, Anselm Kiefer, Mariko Mori, Gillian Brett, Alfred Smith, Dove Allouche, Yves Klein, Lee Bontecou, and others will also be included in this journey to the stars undertaken thanks to the return of Starry Night to the banks of the river that inspired it…

Conflictual borders, anti-migration walls, confinement, social distance, segregation policies—these seemingly dissimilar topics share a common point: space and its political organization. The main effect of climate change is the apparition of a new world map in which carbon dioxide and urban life, desertification and migration, deforestation and social struggles, destruction of animal ecosystems and vegetal invasions, have become brutally interconnected.

PANSORI: A Soundscape of the 21st Century is an operatic exhibition about the space we live in. But as any landscape is also a soundscape, this exhibition is built as a narrative connecting musical and visual forms. Having emerged in 17th century Korea, pansori is a musical genre deeply rooted in its native land. In Korean,pansori literally means « the noise from the public place, » which could also be understood as the voice of the subalterns. The 15th Gwangju Biennale intends to recreate the original spirit of pansori, with artists that try to re-think the space shared between humans, machines, animals, spirits, and organic life— our relational space.

The precession of the equinoxes is an astronomical concept that describes the displacement of the axis around which our planet rotates, affecting the position of the stars as seen from Earth. It returns to its original point every 26,000 years: in astrology, this cycle is broken down by the twelve constellations of the zodiac to associate them with a particular era. So, we are in the process of leaving the age of Pisces for the age of Aquarius, with its virtues of abundance, transformation and hope. Under these cosmic omens, Gaëlle Choisne invites visitors to the Marcel Duchamp Prize to enter a large- scale installation showcasing her work as a video artist, sculptor and painter.

An indefatigable creator of artistic environments that go beyond the exhibition to include banquets, workshops, gardening, body treatments, concerts and performances, Gaëlle Choisne has been building an experimental, multi-faceted archipelago- work for the past ten years. Resolutely curious, her practice embraces a multitude of media and skills, which she hijacks creatively without concern for canon or tradition. A devotee of kitsch aesthetics, her works sweep everyday objects along with them (coins, cigarettes, key rings, false nails), talismans and other carefully collected finds. A builder trained in scenography, she manipulates industrial materials (plaster, concrete, silicone), ceramics and precious metals with the same affection. From this position of referential impurity2 that runs through her work, she deals with the question of the image and the archive as a ‘self-ethnographer’, in other words by tampering with colonial systems of representation through a practice of video and photography that is both reflexive and anthropological. In her films in particular, she allows herself to borrow the voice and tone of the coloniser, while at the same time hijacking its objects of study. Infused with Caribbean diasporic imaginations and a Haitian and French family history, Gaëlle Choisne’s work resonates with the Black Fantasy movement imagined by the British curator Ekow Eshun in a book and exhibition entitled Black Infinity. It brings together artists who find a generative tension between the everyday and the extraordinary to produce new narratives of Black potential. Black fantasy ‘testifies to the conviction that African cultural beliefs and practices are worthy of sincere, rather than sarcastic, consideration as sources of knowledge and creative inspiration’3.

At the Centre Pompidou, Gaëlle Choisne presents an immense carpet of ‘poured cork’ flooring on which five monoliths represent beehives, burrows or termite mounds. Adorned with intricate metalwork, chains and shells, these promontories house small video theatres showing five films made by the artist since 2020 during her travels in Haiti, the Caribbean and Latin America. Initially trained in the dramatic arts, this gesture of miniaturisation reflects her interest in Brecht’s reflections and in epic theatre, which aims to make the spectator aware of his position within the work. From this stellar observation station that plays with scale, the audience can examine a range of human activities: in L’école des actes, the collective fantasising and reclamation of journeys into exile in the Paris region; in Accumulation Primitive, a political and poetic feminist fable about Haiti; in Creole garden in Normandie, sensual gardening in which the plants are the main characters. At the back of the room, the huge paintings on wood from the Safe space for a passing history-Age of Aquarius 99999 series combine pictorial surges, glyphs and talismans with AI-generated faces of strangers. At once a tribute to the activists of the black liberation struggles and a fictional family tree, they act as a cosmogonic cartography that keeps us asking: where are we?

THOMAS CONCHOU

The exhibition Temple of Love. Cœur concludes the residency of Gaëlle Choisne (Cherbourg, 1985) at Scuola Piccola Zattere. Here, new commissions, site-specific interventions and existing works by the artist are put in dialogue with a selection of paintings by Haitian artists from the Jean-Marie Drot collection. 

Temple of Love is a long-term project (2018 – ongoing) developing across successive chapters and drawing from Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1977). Through an approach that combines multiple media, techniques and materials, Choisne builds a progressive, evolving narrative that shapes spaces of coexistence and collaboration, hospitality and affection.

What the artist calls a “temple” is this fluid configuration that is temporarily embedded into the architectural and institutional context of the museum, materially and symbolically turning it into a place where new rules and bonds can emerge. The ritual and sacral connotations are summoned by Choisne not to reproduce the auratic dimen- sion of the museum, which derives from acts of separation and classification, but, on the contrary, to hybridize forms of knowledge that belong to different spheres, cultures and histories. 

In the new chapter of Temple of Love, entitled Cœur after the eponymous entry from Barthes’book, the spiritual and affective connection between the body and the outer world is explored through the symbolism of the house: the architecture of the domestic that hosts, embraces, protects. The exhibition space is reconfigured as a complex ecosystem, each room embodying a chakra, the centers located along the spine that regulate the flow of vital energy in the body. Starting with the heart, positioned at the center of museum space, the exhibition unfolds in two directions creating a circular, immersive flow, an invitation by the artist to a healing procession. The identification between architecture and body resonates in the word Lakay, meaning both house and home in the Creole language, that is depicted as a place of encounters, of spoken words, of intimate moments both sad and joyous in Haitian painting. The homeland of the artist’s mother, and a central reference throughout the artist’s work, Haiti is the guest of honor of this project, invited through the works of eighteen Haitian painters belonging to the private collection of French writer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. The works depict everyday scenes of collective activities and country life, blending with allusions to the ceremonies, rituals and symbols of the Vodou religion. Amplifying the scenes, figures and forms found in the paintings, the exhibition weaves a dense, affectionate and generative dialogue with the spiritual mysticism of Haitian art.

The Jean-Marie Drot collection is an idiosyncratic one comprising more than 500 artworks that Jean-Marie Drot (1929-2015) gathered during his lifetime travelling as a journalist and producer for French television. A pioneer in the use of audiovisual material in culture, Drot became well known thanks to his 1962 series The hot hours in Montparnasse in which he interviewed important figures coming from the Dada and Surrealist movements, such as Man Ray, Cocteau, and Duchamp. However, Drot’s passion focused on naif art, especially self-taught artists, from 1968 when he dis- covered an exhibition catalog with artworks by Yugoslav naif painters. This was the starting point for many adventures that led Drot to seek creative work outside the major artistic movements and Western centers of art, in places such as Bulgaria, Peru, Brazil, Haiti, Greece, Egypt and Japan. Drot’s special interest and expertise in Haitian art led him to direct the video documentary Haiti: A Painted History (1997), and to curate several exhibitions and catalogs, including Journal de voyage en Haïti au pays des peintres de la fête et du vaudou (1974), Haïti: Art Naïf, Art Vaudou (1988) and Haitian Painters: The Encounter of Two Worlds (1992). 

The Drot collection is hosted on the Cycladic island of Ios in Greece in the atypical “house-sculpture” – designed by the Greek artist and his lifelong friend Yannis Yaitis – and in a separate building inside the house complex. It is entitled the Museum of Friendship and, as of today, remains closed to the public. The collection was included in this exhibition as a first attempt at activating it through the prism of contemporary art at the initiative of the curator Eva Vaslamatzi, who has undertaken in-depth research into the Drot collection.

Irene Calderoni and Eva Vaslamatzi

Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order brings together over thirty artists at WIELS and argos, offering new ideas and perspectives on the relationship with our planet.

Adopting the prism of two seemingly opposing terms—magic and realism—, the exhibition examines how artists imagine living environments amid the ecological, political and social challenges that mark today’s world.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from the artistic and literary genre known as magical realism, which is characterised by its infusion of worlds of magic, dreams and myth into mundane narratives—creating stories that redefine the boundaries of reality. The exhibition looks at how the porosity between ‘magic’ and ‘reality’ may open up spaces for other horizons to emerge in response to proliferating monocultures, precarious lives, and climate transformation.

When the world of science and hard facts has been torn apart from the world of magic and intuition, how to reconcile this fracture, what traces does it leave and how do we repair it? The exhibition navigates these questions through works that shape worlds via painting, moving image, sound and installation. They engage with different spaces, from the cosmos and its galaxies to the scientist’s lab; matters such as bodies of water, bacterial skins or 3D prints; and geologic processes surfacing through the underground rumbling of the earth or the noise of a sinking city.

The artists navigate different, complementary and contradictory ways of relating to ecosystems and myths of the “natural” environment, seeking refuge in dreams and in the raw matter and bare life of the world. At the confluence of analytic and speculative tools, Magical Realism gestures towards restoring connections in a biosphere exhausted by exploitation, dispossession and debt.

Magical Realism follows  The Absent Museum (2017) and Risquons-tout (2020) as the third in-house realisation of a recurring ambitious exhibition format developed and conceived by the WIELS team, focusing on specific patterns within contemporary artistic practice that underscore the necessity for transformation.

Through a large-scale exhibition—including a section organised at argos—a publication and a live program including workshops, talks, screenings, walks and performances, Magical Realism reflects an ecology that addresses both the aesthetic implications of our relationship with natural worlds at a tipping point, as well as the social, economic and scientific implications of exploring and shifting our conceptions of the planet.