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Centre Pompidou
Place
Georges Pompidou
+33 (0)1 44 78 12 33
Paris
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 Seventies to the 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 part devoted to the visual arts (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 the new communities and cultures that have emerged in it, together with the new perceptions of space and time associated with these transformations. The exhibition examines the notions of the risk society and of urban ecology, and offers responses to questions concerning the place of the individual (and its redefinition) in the urban space.

Among the artists shown are some linked with the Centre's history, such as Marcel 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, among others. 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, enacts the relationships between the here and the elsewhere and between the inner landscape of the human mind and the universe. The exhibition thus proposes a forward-looking exploration of current innovation and experiment in architecture, landscape and design, evoking thematic correspondences and playful associations.

Internet Forum — www.centrepompidou.
fr/airsdeparis
The Centre has set up an internet discussion forum, intended by the curators as a background to the exhibition, which gathers together reflections on the 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 the way we think the city and attempt to structure it formally; Uses and Experimentations, which deals with the way in which urban space is used, appropriated and sometimes transgressed by its inhabitants; Escapes, a more conceptual thread that examines certain key ideas such as threshold, frontier, utopia, plan and place; and Constitutive Elements, which invites participants to think concretely about the meanings of certain clearly defined urban spaces such as streets and squares. Among the contributors are Nicolas Bouyssi, Jill Fenton, Antoine Hatzenberger, Salvador Juan, Christophe Kihm, Laurent de Sutter, Didier Talagrand, Jean Louis Violeau and Dork Zabunyan.

Around the Exhibtion — Spectacles Vivants
The Spectacles Vivants will present 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 (referring to Douleur exquise by Sophie Calle).

HeHe (Helen Evans et Heiko Hansen), Étude préparatoire pour le dispositif Champs d’ozone, conçu pour l’exposition Airs de Paris,
montage photographique, 2006.

Marcel Duchamp, Air de Paris, 1919-1964, Réplique réalisée sous la direction de Marcel Duchamp, par la Galerie Schwarz, à Milan,
en 1964, Original créé à Paris, en décembre 1919, Quatrième version du ready-made, verre et bois, 14,5 x 8,5 x 8,5 cm, Collection Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, ©Succession Marcel Duchamp/Adagp, Paris 2007.

Sophie Calle, Tour Eiffel. Sophie Calle, 2007, Installation en quatre parties : six photographies, prises depuis la tour Eiffel en 1979,
un journal intime de 1979, le diptyque Chambre avec vue, et un néon portant le titre de l’ensemble, Cette installation est mise en
regard avec l'œuvre Eiffel Tower de Hiroshi Sugimoto. Production du Centre Pompidou pour l’exposition Airs de Paris, Courtesy
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, © Adagp, Paris 2007.