Paris Triennale: Intense Proximity

In this high-profile artistic "spring-summer", artistic director Okwui Enwezor combines the best of French research with an ethnographic and anthropologic agenda on emerging international artists.

Based on the rhizomatic model but in the style of great events, La Triennale has taken over the city's extensive and renovated contemporary art spaces. Almost in synchrony, the rooms of the recently reopened Palais de Tokyo (with Jean de Loisy as its new director), extended at last to fill all 22,000 square metres, will be under the artistic direction of Okwui Enwezor until August. Assisted by a team of experts and talent scouts on the international art scene — Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard and Claire Staebler — Enwezor aims to create a hybrid Parisian cultural fabric with Intense Proximity, combining the best of French research with an ethnographic and anthropologic agenda on emerging international artists. A host of events feature in satellite exhibition spaces such as Bétonsalon and Le Credac in Ivry and on the packed calendar of the Grand Palais, including Rirkrit Tiravanija's Soup/No Soup, culminating with the 2012 Monumenta entrusted to Daniel Buren. On paper, the exhibition offer is staggering and probably intended to compete on an exhibition scale with other European events this summer such as Documenta(13).

The Musée Galliera boasts a colossal work by El Anatsui covering the facade of its splendid pavilion-construction site. A pervasive presence of installations and proposals — an online La Triennale newsletter and intense media cultural activity on the sidelines — is planned in the hope that the public will fully enjoy this high-profile artistic "spring-summer". From the Louvre to the mediatised suburbs, La Triennale inherits the difficult political mission of highlighting the innovating nature of the French scene with an event first launched in 2006 and clumsily named La Force de l'Art [The Strenght of Art].

<em>Intense Proximity</em>, Paris Triennial at the Palais de Tokyo, installation view — *Intense Proximity*, Paris Triennial at the Palais de Tokyo, installation view

What we really need is an urban circumnavigation to visit the exhibition venues and an eye on a calendar with a constant offer of film events. Bétonsalon has pursued its own anthropological path with the Tropicomania, the social life of plants exhibition, a new take on exoticism, agronomy and trade; the showing of Amos Gitai's < target="_blank">Ananas, a rare 1984 film scheduled at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in June, is truly prophetic on globalisation and its thought. The gender, "queer" and toxic universe is explored in a productive residency at the Laboratoire des Aubervilliers by Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz, whose work has revisited police archives, old documents, photographs and films to illustrate the history or histories, cancelled or made illegible, of a movement that was crucial to the contemporary aesthetic.

Performances and a talk by Nana Adusei-Poku, albeit somewhat cramped in the Aubervillieres workshops, expanded on core issues in the catalogue timidly portrayed in artistic director Okwui Enzwenor's central display and formulation. The works on show at the Palais de Tokyo are decidedly more polished and the artists and works asked to address the intriguing ethnographic story in the catalogue often seem chosen with an eye on the decorative bent typical of great spectacles, although the theoretical contribution of the artists present was carefully vetted — from Alfredo Jaar to Carol Rama, who has far better works that could compete with the scale of these spaces. More often, it is the artists who pioneer criticism of the institution. When exhibiting, Adrian Piper and that real outsider Zdenek Kosek were constant thorns in the side and revealed how impossible unity and definition are in the contemporary art context. The ethnographic filter adopted by the curator works on paper and the catalogue is magnificent but the narrative becomes far less interesting when it evolves and unfolds through the rooms. The artist's work — take for example George Abeagbo — seems confined, segregated and even crushed in its ephemeral form. The bazaar form, the accumulation or random juxtaposition produced in its quintessential beauty, clashes with the showroom form of art licked clean and ready for a white cube.

The ethnographic filter adopted by the curator works on paper and the catalogue is magnificent but the narrative becomes far less interesting when it evolves and unfolds through the rooms

The general impression is that we cannot ignore the fact that a lovely photograph, Thomas Struth's Paradise Jungle — and there are four of them —, forms a contemporary multi-million-dollar backdrop and is splendidly installed to make a more ideological impact than a Jean Rouch film. The whole problem with this exhibition can be found in Sarkozy's 2007 speech in Dakar and his "the African has not fully entered into history"; it lies in the racism and populism behind the creation of a French Ministry of Immigration and National Identity; and it happens to be an electoral platform for politicians who have their photograph taken against Ulla von Brandeburg's skate-ring but nowhere near El Anatsui's sumptuously rich trash works. A small and inconspicuous steel and Plexiglas plaque on the ground floor, also engraved in Braille, tells us that the new Palais de Tokyo was opened a week before the presidential elections. Quay Branly is a legacy of the Chirac presidency and the post-enlightenment attitude they would like to inherit with this Triennale is a hard ingredient to digest in a global world.

Through 26 August 2012
La Triennale: Intense Proximity
Palais de Tokyo, Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Centre d'art contemporain d'Ivry – le Crédac, Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Grand Palais, Instants Chavirés, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Musée du Louvre

Rirkrit Tiravanija's <em>Soup/No Soup</em> at the Grand Palais, on 7 March 2012. From left: Rirkrit Tiravanija, the chef who cooked the soup, Chloé, who directed the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP)-organized event. Photo by Marc Sanchez — Rirkrit Tiravanija's *Soup/No Soup* at the Grand Palais, on 7 March 2012. From left: Rirkrit Tiravanija, the chef who cooked the soup, Chloé, who directed the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP)-organized event. Photo by Marc Sanchez

Boris Achour, <em>Séances</em>, at Credac through 3 June 2012. Film still from <em>Naissance du mikado</em> [Mikado's birth], 2012. © Boris Achour — Boris Achour, *Séances*, at Credac through 3 June 2012. Film still from *Naissance du mikado* [Mikado's birth], 2012. © Boris Achour

Paris Triennale: Intense Proximity

In this high-profile artistic "spring-summer", artistic director Okwui Enwezor combines the best of French research with an ethnographic and anthropologic agenda on emerging international artists.

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