Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo has entrusted the light-filled “grande verrière” gallery and its 60-metre-long curved walls to Malala Andrialavidrazana, who will use this opportunity to reshape the digital photomontages she has been developing since 2015 into a new proposition at an architectural scale. Her project at the Palais thus constitutes both a solo exhibition, her first in a public institution in Paris, and a retrospective that incorporates new works.

Malala Andrialavidrazana’s Figures are akin to geographical maps, on which representations drawn from stamps, banknotes, prints, advertisements and other iconographic sources selected by the artist are superimposed. If collage is an art of conflict, in which multiple contradictory realities are brought together with one another, the map is a product of mechanisms of knowledge and power situated in history as much as in geography. “Who is speaking?” and “Where are they speaking from?” are the questions that inevitably arise when we contemplate these tools.

For this exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo is partnering with the Fonds Yavarhoussen to create an interactive mediation tool which will allow the public to discover the iconographic sources of the artist’s works, as well as to publish a monograph of Malala Andrialavidrazana’s recent work with Éditions Dialecta.

Curator: François Piron