The exhibition Exiles – Artists perspectives, on show at the Louvre Lens from 25 September 2024 to 20 January 2025, is dense and multi-faceted, encompassing the great exiles of the Bible, the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the Ramayana, through to the contemporary exiles that are the consequence of the many wars affecting millions of people today. The 19th, 20th and 21st centuries are the most represented, from all nationalities and geographical areas. The exhibition features works by Josef Koudelka, Edouard Manet, Pascale Consigny, Khaled Dawwa, Zao Wou-Ki, Barthélémy Toguo, Djamel Tatah, Jems Koko Bi, Yan Pei-Ming, Kader Attia, Marco Godinho, Victor Hugo and Honoré Daumier.
Visitors to the exhibition will be able to explore in six different spaces the theme of exile through time and space, in the uprooting, the welcoming, the pain, the memory and the creation.
The five works by Antoni Clavé are presented in the section of the exhibition entitled ‘’Nulle part‘’ (Nowhere), which highlights the internment camps where ‘the “undesirables‘’ – foreigners who in this case were the Spanish republican fugitives – were rounded up after Franco’s victory in 1939. This systematic segregation of refugees emerged at the end of the Cold War, and it remains a terrible reality today.
The photographs by Mathieu Pernot, Bruno Serralonge, Jacqueline Salmon and Gilles Raynaldi echo Clavé’s drawings of his companions waiting in the camps in the eastern Pyrenees.
“If, instead of considering them in terms of their point of departure or who we think they are, we consider what they do, what they have done to flee, to cross, to resist, to survive, to rebuild in precarious circumstances and their wanderings; if, instead of assessing what they have lost, abandoned or what they have had to give up, we consider what they produce in terms of communities, collective experiences, social inventiveness and inter-community solidarity; if, instead of bemoaning the loss of their world, we look at the worlds they are constantly creating, reinventing and weaving, not in the manner of an edifice but of networks of intelligence, of sensitive sharing, of improvised and evolving institutions; then we stop lapsing into demonization, victimisation and proletarianization, and discover ‘the abstract nakedness of a human being and nothing but a human being’.”
Curator Dominique de Font-Réaulx quoting the philosopher Etienne Tassin in the introduction to the catalogue of this exhibition. It’s an apt choice, because it speaks to the way artists look at their experience of exile, but also about the way we look at those in exile, whether they be artists or not.The catalogue is replete with texts about literary exile, as well as texts highlighting the expression of exile in the visual arts.
This is a must-see exhibition, running until 20 January 2025 at the Louvre Lens.