In collaboration with the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Palais de Tokyo organizes the exhibition Translation with works from the Dakis Joannou Collection and interventions by M/M (Paris), graphic designers and artists Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak. The show brings together major artworks by some of the leading artists of the last two decades, such as Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Vanessa Beecroft, and Takashi Murakami, plunged by M/M (Paris) into an unexpected multiform graphic context where essential works of art go through multiple translations.
What would be the current form of “modern” in art today in the age of globalization? Translation tries to sketch out an answer to that question by taking stock of today’s art from the Joannou Collection via M/M’s own view of major artworks from the recent past: are we about to see a new modernism appear, one founded on a resistance to the standardization of culture? After 20th-century modernism, which aspired to the international language of abstraction, the aim for the artists of today is to translate into a contemporary language the particularities of their specific cultural identity, social singularity, and difference.
This mutant form of a hybrid culture, this art of resisting the standardization of cultures and of the world economy, might best be called altermodernism. Curated by Nicholas Bourriaud, Jérome Sans & Marc Sanchez, Translation is both an attempt to approach that new spirit and, as the result of the interventions by M/M (Paris), a unique exhibition experience.
