La Triennale 2012 announces the opening of Intense Proximity, a major exhibition of contemporary art opening on April 20th at the newly renovated and expanded Palais de Tokyo and seven other institutions located throughout greater Paris including 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, and the Musée du Louvre. This exhibition marks the reopening of all three floors of the Palais de Tokyo, which has been refurbished by Parisian architects Lacaton & Vassal and we here at the IAF are happy to announce that Anne Lacaton will be giving a talk here in September as part of our lecture series Agents of Architecture.

Intense Proximity draws upon the fields of visual art, ethnography, anthropology, cinema, literature, music, and performance, and explores the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This exhibition features over 130 contributors, including Marc Allégret, André Gide, Marcel Griaule, Wifredo Lam, Pierre Verger, Walker Evans, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and emphasizes synchronic points of convergence among these names and their work.

As a prelude to the public opening of La Triennale 2012, Rirkrit Tiravanija will transform the Nave of the Grand Palais into an enormous, festive, twelve-hour banquet as he presents — for the first time in Paris — a large-scale edition of his ongoing artwork, Soup/No Soup. On Saturday, April 7th from noon until midnight, the Grand Palais will give free access for all to share and sample a soup prepared by the artist and his team.

La Triennale 2012 also features a bilingual exhibition guide and a substantial publication, Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far. At over seven hundred pages, the full-color anthology includes a series of visual essays from all contributors to the exhibition as well as eleven newly commissioned essays by leading figures from the fields of contemporary art, ethnography, and politics, and a series of twenty-six historical texts foregrounding the convergence of artistic practices and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The guide has been edited by Okwui Enwezor, Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler and co-published as two distinct volumes (French and English) by the Centre national des arts plastiques (“CNAP”), and the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais/Artlys.

Intense Proximity 20 April–26 August 2012. Soup/No Soup April 7th.

La Triennale 2012 – Intense Proximity is a project by Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor and Associate Curators Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Emilie Renard, and Claire Staebler.

La Triennale is organized at the initiative of the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication / Direction générale de la création artistique, commissioner, with the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), associate commissioner, and produced by the Palais de Tokyo.

Visit the website for more information

Photo: Anne Lacaton et Jean-Philippe Vassal Architects.