The “EXILS – Regards d’artistes” exhibition at the Louvre Lens opens with a small paper boat in a glass vitrine, ‘SOS Méditerranée’—a humanitarian organization—and ‘#TogetherForRescue’ emblazoned on its side. Similarly acknowledging the current problem of material migrants, a synthetic and cotton backpack made of life vests collected along the coast of the island of Lesvos can be found elsewhere in the exhibition (a project of Lesvos Solidarity, a Greek NGO that supports refugees).
Behind the paper boat, French artist Richard Baquié’s 1989 stainless steel collection spells out the wall, Null part est un endroit” (“Nowhere”). Is this phrase pithy or empty? The exhibition included 200 works on the charged topic but in quantity, it does not make a coherent sense because the curator uses a very broad definition of exile to arrive at a coherent point about migration in the modern world.
Starting with biblical settings and Greek mythology, then moving on to the non-locality of the time, this sweeping scope ends up with a flat effect. As Edward W. Said writes in Thinking About Exile in 1984 that “the difference between the exiles of the past and those of our time is that, it has a depressing dimension: our era—with its modern wars, imperialism and the religious desires of dictatorial rulers—is indeed an era of refugees, displaced people, many immigrants. ” This important point is not addressed meaningfully in the show, where Odysseus is given the same narrative narrative as modern asylum seekers.
Moving on, the visitor encounters a 2013 installation by Cameroonian-French artist Barthélémy Toguo, where bundles of cloth and plastic bags are stacked high and tied to a bicycle—echoing the work of Korean artist Kimsooja and his 2007 video. Bottari Truck – Immigrant on, when a woman in a cart loaded with bundles made of bedclothes rides through Paris to reach the church of Saint-Bernard (a site that once sheltered undocumented migrants who were brutally dispersed by the police in the mid-1990s). Materiality and volume—the multitude of things we own and how they express who we are—become an uncomfortable burden when escape is essential. Toguo has another entry in the exhibition—The climax of the New Worldmade in 2001 in the form of large rubber stamps used in passport control, emphasizing the great stress on customs and borders.
In a less important episode, it’s Portuguese singer Marco Godinho Written by Water (2013/2024)—which was part of the Luxembourg Pavilion of the 2019 Venice Biennale—shows hundreds of open, blank notebooks arranged in a systematic way. Immersed in the Mediterranean from coastal locations from Gibraltar to Marseille, these brightly colored pages evoke the fragility of navigating these vast waters.
Among the various video clips, a short film by Adrian Paci born in 2007 Centro di Permanenza Temporanea (Temporary Detention Center) is functional and uncomfortable: it shows dense clusters of people waiting on escalators, the kind that usually lead to an airplane. No one ever came, and the crowd stood idle and dense, getting nowhere Waiting for Godot-stupidity of style.
SEE ALSO: Light Machines, Digital Reality and the Art of Technological Nostalgia at Tate Modern
Taysir Batniji who was born in Gaza It has no title (1998-2021), a suitcase full of sand, sounds particularly bleak when viewed in the context of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, with its depiction of warring countries. In a neighboring region, Syrian artist Khaled Dawwad’s polystyrene and iron maquette (2018-2021) of the devastated Ghouta area near Damascus—destroyed by wartime bombings and the release of sarin gas ordered by Bashar al Assad—is a sad sight, urban infrastructure and stamp that of man became an irreparable waste.
Bringing together the various parts of the exhibition in the main area, the library area presents books, among others, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt, the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire. , French-Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Here, intellectual reflection and exile literature is the result and brings out many ideas.
By contrast, another part of the show, called “Internal Exile,” is cringe-level maladroit. The folly of including French painter Eugène Delacroix in an exhibition about exile because he “didn’t find his place in society after the French Revolution” and went 30 kilometers outside of Paris to paint bouquets that looked like an insult to anyone who was expelled. and it shows the certain tone-deafness of the host (a white French woman). “The artists presented in this exhibition do not look at exile from afar,” he writes in the graffiti—one would hope not, but this installation undercuts the theme. As Said noted: “Anyone who is truly homeless finds the tendency to see alienation in everything modern to be touching,” and, further, “the great contemporary interest in exile can be traced to a certain negative perception of non-exiles. to the benefits of exile as a means of redemption.”
The exhibition ends with an event seen on French soil, not far from Lens itself: the Calais Jungle, located in the north of the country, where nine thousand refugees were detained from 2015 until the camp was dissolved in 2017. This port For centuries the city has been a route of migration across Europe—there have been other camps in Calais as well. years, but these slums caught the attention of the world’s media during the European migrant crisis; Currently, there is a policy of “no resettlement” for migrants in the region, an attempt to stop large camps from being resettled. In this exhibition, Gilles Raynaldy’s photographs of Sudanese migrants and their settlements are presented, alongside Bruno Serralongue’s examination, ten years earlier, of the living conditions of refugees trying to cross the Channel to England. Frank Smith of 2023 Les Films des Objets (Movies of Things) is a series of twelve short films that set things in motion in the dunes of Fort Vert. The landscape bears no trace of its recent refugee history, just a backdrop of calm sand and blue water.
The exhibition highlights the incredible right to stay protected in the country of origin and the luxury of choosing where you live—something that the average European viewer is rarely lucky enough to experience. What art can do to convey the pain of diaspora and displacement may be relatively weak. Still, it’s an important reminder that rooting is not to be taken for granted in this turbulent world.
“EXILS – Regards d’artists” is at the Louvre Lens until January 20, 2025.
