Wangechi Mutu: intertwined 
New Museum di New York
03/02/23-06/04/23

The New Museum presents a major solo exhibition of the work of Wangechi Mutu (b. 1972, Nairobi), which will bring together over one hundred works from across her twenty-five-year career.
Representing the full breadth of her practice, the presentation will encompass painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, film, and performance. Mutu first gained acclaim for her collage-based practice exploring camouflage, transformation, and mutation. She extends these strategies to her work across various media, developing hybrid, fantastical forms that fuse mythical and folkloric narratives with layered sociohistorical references. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined” will trace connections between recent developments in the artist’s sculptural practice and her decades-long exploration of the legacies of colonialism, globalization, and African and diasporic cultural traditions. At once culturally specific and transnational in scope, Mutu’s work grapples with contemporary realities, while proffering new models for a radically changed future informed by feminism, Afrofuturism, and interspecies symbiosis.
(press release)

Cyprien Gaillard, Humpty/Dumpty
Lafayette Anticipations, Parigi
Oct 2022 to 08 Jan 2023
Curator: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

HUMPTY \ DUMPTY is a new project by Cyprien Gaillard: an exhibition in two chapters, presented at the same time at Lafayette Anticipations and the Palais de Tokyo.
At Lafayette Anticipations, Cyprien Gaillard is giving new life to a work that has fallen into oblivion. A monumental sculpture installed since 1979 in the heart of Paris, Jacques Monestier’s automaton Le Défenseur du Temps, a unique clock, consists of a man perched on a rock carrying a sword and a shield. The last movements of the automaton took place in 2003, and it has since been abandoned to the effects of time, against which it was trying to protect us.
For this exhibition, Cyprien Gaillard is working on its rebirth. The restoration of the automaton, at the centre of an opera in which it is the main actor, is put into perspective with the impossible return of the in perspective with the impossible return of a friend of the of the artist, who disappeared a few years earlier.
At the end of the exhibition, Le Défenseur du Temps will be reinstalled, renovated, in its original location.
Inspired by the times, when Paris was frantically restoring its most prestigious monuments and Gaillard reveals how the city is a privileged terrain for the expression of disorder, and how humans try to fight against these traces.
It is in the margins, the nooks and crannies, and the spaces of dissidence that the artist probes our desires for order and permanence and finds the narratives of possible new balances.
At the Palais de Tokyo, HUMPTYDUMPTY brings together a selection of works that have never been shown before in France, as well as those of guest artists. Through the relationship between the body and architecture, abandoned territories, evocations of war and invasive species, Gaillard paints a portrait of our link to collapse and reconstruction. The obsession with the preservation of beings and the conservation of things, and the permanent temptation to maintain or regain a certain order in the world, are revealed.
(press release)