For over twenty years, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain has been developing a program that explores major current ecological challenges. Over time, its collection has grown to include numerous works that invite us to take a fresh look at the beauty and vulnerability of the living world. Bringing together more than 250 works primarily from this collection, the exhibition The Living invites us to move beyond anthropocentrism in order to reinvent, with empathy and humility, a new way of coexisting with plants and animals on Earth.

Contrary to Western tradition, The Living invites us, through observation and observation, to consider non-humans as our equals within a vast shared world—the world of the living. The exhibition brings together a community of artists and scientists engaged in an aesthetic and existential quest, deeply marked by the enigmatic beauty of the living world. These include the American musician and bioacoustician Bernie Krause, the Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang, the French visual artist Fabrice Hyber, the Armenian filmmaker Artavazd Pelechian, the French botanist Francis Hallé, and the American artist Tony Oursler. Their works are among the most emblematic in the Fondation Cartier collection and are the result of several years of collaborative work between these artists and the institution. The exhibition, "The Living," also provides the Fondation Cartier with an opportunity to develop new collaborations with artists such as the Brazilians Bruno Novelli and Solange Pessoa.

Furthermore, the heart of the exhibition consists of an exceptional group of works by contemporary Native American artists, brought together for the first time in Europe. Their experience of a relationship of equality between living beings, human and non-human, constitutes an immemorial tradition from which we have much to learn in this time of ecological crisis. These artists come from the Brazilian Amazon, such as Jaider Esbell (Makuxi people), Ehuana Yaira and Joseca (Yanomami), Bane, Isaka, and Mana (Huni Kuin), but also from the Venezuelan Amazon, such as Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Yanomami). The exhibition also includes a selection of drawings by Nivaklé and Guaraní artists living in the Paraguayan Chaco, including Esteban and Angélica Klassen, Floriberta Fermín, Marcos Ortiz, Clemente Juliuz, Osvaldo Pitoe, and Jorge Carema.

The Living thus extends a series of exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier that question the place Western man has arrogated to himself at the top of a supposed pyramid of living beings and peoples: Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest (2003), Native Land, Elsewhere Begins Here (2008), Stories of Seeing (2012), The Great Animal Orchestra (2016), and, more recently, We the Trees (2019) and Claudia Andujar, The Yanomami Struggle (2020).

Curated by Bruce Albert, anthropologist, and Hervé Chandès, Artistic Director of the Fondation Cartier, in collaboration with Juliette Lecorne, Associate Curator.

Saiba mais em https://www.fondationcartier.com/programme/exposition/les-vivants