Centre Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou
75004 Paris
+33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Gallery 1A, Level 6, 2000 M2
Airs de Paris
April 25-August 15

The Centre Pompidou celebrates its 30th anniversary with Airs de Paris, 73 contemporary artists, architects and designers. The title echoes that of a piece by Marcel Duchamp, with a retrospective of whose work the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977.

Consisting of two parts, the exhibition presents works from the 1970s-present, on the theme of the city and urban life. It treats Paris as a point of convergence, where the exhibited artists may have lived or worked or intervened.

The visual arts portion (1500 m) is divided into 10 sections organized around themes suggested by the works exhibited. These explore, through the artists' eyes, the technological, economic and social changes undergone by the city and new communities and cultures that have emerged, together with new perceptions of space and time associated with these transformations. The exhibition examines notions of the risk society and of urban ecology, and responds to questions concerning the individual's place and its redefinition in the urban space.

Some of the artists show\ing are linked with the Centre's history, such as Duchamp, Gordon Matta-Clark, Chris Marker, Gérard Gasiorowski, and Raymond Hains. There are also new works by Tatiana Trouvé, Carsten Höller, Stéphane Calais, Jean-Luc Moulène, Daniel Buren, Saâdane Afif, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Nan Goldin. The part devoted to architecture, design, landscape and urban planning (500m2) offers an exhibition space that spirals up from a car park … to the surface of Mars.

This is organised in four sections, offering a glimpse of the imagined city of today and tomorrow, with works by Patrick Blanc, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, Campement Urbain, Gilles Clément, Didier Faustino, Zaha Hadid, HeHe, Bruno Latour, Jasper Morrison and Philippe Rahm. This dynamic shift from urban centre to periphery, from ground to air, triggers relationships between here and elsewhere and between the inner landscape of the human mind and the universe. The exhibition proposes forward-looking exploration of current innovation and experiment in architecture, landscape and design, evoking thematic correspondences and playful associations.

The Centre has set up an internet discussion forum, intended by curators as a background to the exhibition, which gathers together reflections on themes of the exhibition by leading figures in the arts and in urban research. Moderated by philosopher Elie During and sociologist Laurent Jeanpierre, it is organised around four major themes: Forms and Cartographies, which looks at how we think about the city and attempt to structure it formally; Uses and Experimentations, dealing with how urban space is used, appropriated and sometimes transgressed by its inhabitants; Escapes, a more conceptual thread, examining key ideas such as threshold, frontier, utopia, plan and place; and Constitutive Elements, inviting participants to think concretely about meanings of certain clearly defined urban spaces such as streets and squares. Among contributors are Nicolas Bouyssi, Jill Fenton, Antoine Hatzenberger, Salvador Juan, Christophe Kihm, Laurent de Sutter, Didier Talagrand, Jean Louis Violeau and Dork Zabunyan.

The Spectacles Vivants presents performance pieces involving visual artists, musicians and choreographers, among them a first-time collaboration between Xavier Veilhan and the Paris musical duo Air, on 6 and 7 April 2007, at 8.30 pm in the Grande Salle (also at the Tate Gallery, London, in May 2007), and an original work by Forced Entertainment (Douleur exquise by Sophie Calle).

Gilles Clément, Friche de Nanterre, 2006.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Inter-Sect, detail, 1974, (Etant d’art pour locataire, Quel Con, Quel Can ou Call Can), Film 16mm couleur, silencieux, 18’40”, Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, © Adagp, Paris 2007.