a sentimental collection
24 September 2022 – 29 January 2023
What is a museum? What would your ideal museum be? These are some of questions that our new curators asked themselves in an artistic and political gesture, in order to imagine new rules for art.
The exhibition presented here is the result of the choices of a singular collective: reuniting citizens, artists and the staff of our contemporary art center. This curatorial team, which includes people in precarious situations – followed by some social structures – proposes an archaeology of tenderness, making the artworks showed at the Lambert Collection vibrating and acting as a revelation of our common fragility.
Our museum invites you to discover personal mausoleums: intimate stuffs that we adore and works that we choose. Building together the iconic Yvon Lambert’s collection with our most precious possessions, the exhibition reveals our attachment to objects and the histories we love.
Changing the way a museum collection is displayed
This exhibition was thinked in order to transform the traditionals uses of exhibitions in partnership with some founding structures and partners like “C’est pas du luxe!” festival, the artist Mohamed El Khatib and the team of the Collection Lambert itself. Together we have the realization of this exhibition of a new kind. The reflections of american artists of the 1990’s avant-garde such as Martha Rosler, Marion Von Osten or Thomas Hirschhorn are the references that have nourished this project.
A letter written jointly by the initiators of the project was sent to various social structures (shelters, boarding houses and other associations fighting against exclusion) participating in the festival with the goal of recruiting people who would like to become the associate curators of this original exhibition.
A group of fifteen people – men and women accommodated by the structures, social workers working daily at their side – responded to the letter with enthusiasm and have made up the team of organizers of the exhibition for a year.
During an inaugural work session, each person was invited to bring a personal object that was dear to him or her. The constitution of this intimate gallery was the first gesture of our collection.
Objects that tell life stories, family stories, ordinary objects for lives that are often out of the ordinary. All of these objects and the stories they carry with them would be the starting point for an exhibition in which they would enter into a relationship with a series of works from the Lambert Collection, chosen jointly by the curators associated with the project.
It is by basing the work process on the question of the intimate link that we build with objects that are dear to us, those that we hold dear and that we keep close to us, that we looked together at the works of the Lambert Collection. We watched for the first feelings that could arise when we met them, in the rooms or the reserves of the museum. As with our own objects, we looked for the stories behind the gestures, behind a title, behind the forms unfolded before our eyes in order to find links, to initiate dialogues.
To offer everyone the possibility of reappropriating a heritage collection and the places that house it
Offering everyone a privileged access to artistic creation requires more than pricing policies aimed at those who are awkwardly called “those prevented from culture”. To give birth to the desire in each one to appropriate a heritage place and to enjoy the works that it welcomes obliges us to think in depth the relations that we maintain with the works of art and their places of destination.
How does one attribute an aesthetic value to a particular object? How and when is it given the title of “work”? How does one decide to make it a sanctuary by exposing it as such to the view of all those who will want to come to it? Beyond that, who are the people who participate in the whole process of decision and validation?
By involving in all these stages people from very diverse cultural and social backgrounds, usually kept away from such operations, the experiment opened by our museum aims to invest these questions in depth and to divert the usual models.
It is through discussion, thought, and the common desire to do and to do together that the project was built and that this unique space of time was born that the participants decided to name our museum.
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More info in the press kit
Curatorial Team: Ellen Allart / Nathalie Besson / Agnès Bouisset / Ophélie Brisset / Fabrice Casimir / Laure Drouche / Christine Dubois / Daniel Duckwitz / Mohamed El Khatib / Camille Fund / Pascal Fra / Marie-Laure Geuffroy / Christine Gisquet / Laurent Granero / Eve Guerin / Diane Haudiquet / Stéphane Ibars / Brigitte Lefebvre / Clara Marchand / Bernie Marie / Philippe Montagnier / Michel Ortegas / Nicolas Rabinowitch / Tiphanie Romain / Eric Supper / Anne-Marie V. / Alain Vandeur.
The lenders : Hakima / Ellen Allart / Fabien Almakiewicz / Sophie Aragon / Cindy Avon / Noura Benyoussef / Milène Boulant / Tymour Boussou / Vanessa Bouziges / Eric Chaussepied / Tiphaine Colleter / Alice Durel / Mohamed El Khatib / Christophe Giovannini / Ismaël Guenoun Sanz / Stéphane Ibars / Tony Joachim / Abdallah K. / Sylvie Ladrière / Marlène Lombardin / Mayeul Maurel / Marie Plagnol / Judith Quintin / Jean-Christophe Radke / Tiphanie Romain / Clémentine Sibbour / Florence Tabourdeau / Jeanne et Timéo Taris / Thierry Thieû Niang / Sevval Yuruten.
