Surprise appointment at the Palais de Tokyo: Guillaume Désanges was chosen by the Elysee Palace, on the proposal of Roselyne Bachelot, Minister of Culture, to head the Parisian cultural institution. He will replace Emma Lavigne, who left in October for the Pinault collection. The name of this independent art critic and curator had escaped rumors. But his reputation is well established in the art world, the lines of which he has been shaking up for nearly twenty years. “The Palais de Tokyo is an exciting challenge, and I thought it was the right time for me and for the Palais, he told us. It has the power of a great institution and the flexibility of an art center: it is a great opportunity on which to rely. “
Having worked there on several occasions, he knows every nook and cranny of the institution and its potential: “In 2004, with the plastic artist Thomas Hirschhorn, I initiated the project 24H Foucault, which corresponds well to the idea of a living place that I defend today ” : the Palace, then populated by non-stop conversations around the philosopher, offered another relationship to the public. Fourteen years later, he would come back to accompany the artist Neïl Beloufa, around an equally explosive proposition.
Trained in management and philosophy, Guillaume Désanges entered the field of art, strong in the daring of the self-taught.
From public to private, from confidential projects to exhibitions for the general public, from the SMAK in Ghent, Belgium, to the Performa festival in New York, his career is rich and original: trained in management and philosophy, Guillaume Désanges has come into the field the strong art of the self-taught daring. Initiator of “performance conferences”, in charge of the programming of La Verrière Hermès, in Brussels, since 2013, recently called to the direction of the Salon de Montrouge (Hauts-de-Seine), he has also orchestrated vast thematic exhibitions: conceived in 2011 with Hélène Guenin at the Center Pompidou-Metz, “Erre” consisted of variations on the labyrinth; “The French Spirit”, imagined with his accomplice François Piron, summoned the underground landscape of France in the 1970s and 1980s at the Maison rouge, in Paris, in 2017.
A biennial project outside the walls
His strategy as a future president is in line with these experiences. “My goal is to make the Palais de Tokyo a reactive, indeterminate, somewhat wild place, sensitive to societal issues and current events. A place with a somewhat cloudy and fluid identity, which welcomes a variety of species, an elasticity of forms, without however turning into the Spanish inn ”, underlines Guillaume Désanges.
You have 57.47% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.
