The Les portes du jour [The Doors of Dawn] exhibition is envisioned as an open scenario, a script without an imposed ending, which allows us to grasp time and space differently.

Set up on two historical sites, the Carnavalet and Cognacq- Jay museums, fve works by contemporary artists who won the ‘1% marché de l’art’ award have been brought together according to their common acuity in refecting on the present, halfway between utopia and dystopia. Different temporalities and realities - both imaginary and physical, interior and exterior, local and global - coexist, as oracles, signs to be interpreted, beyond any fixed certainty.

Installed in the Cognacq-Jay garden, echoing the views of Venice by Canaletto, Guardi and Tiepolo above, Se Mi Vedi, Piangi is a sculpture conceived from an old palina - the famous red and white striped signposts of the Venice canals - on which Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil has inscribed upside down: “If you see me, cry”.

The phrase is based on the hungersteine, literally “hunger stones” in German. Placed on the bed of rivers like the Elbe, these engraved rocks are only visible when the water level is low. Memorials to past droughts and famines, they are also premonitory warnings of present and future catastrophes, addressed to those who continue to discover them today and possibly in the future.

More information here

Musée Cognacq-Jay
8 rue Elzévir
75003 Paris