Paris has long captured the artistic imagination. In the decades leading up to this exhibition, Paris, like the other great post-colonial metropolitan centres in Western Europe, had become home not only to itinerant Europeans, but to citizens from further afield.
Their presence infused these cities with a cultural vitality and pluralism which transformed established ideas of location, identity and culture itself.
This exhibition curated by Hou Hanru, a Chinese curator and critic based in Paris, brought together the work of nine artists who live and work (or lived and worked) in Paris but whose cultural roots lie outside France: Absalon, Chen Zhen, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Thomas Hirschhorn, Huang Yong Ping, Tiina Ketara, Sarkis, Shen Yuan, and Tsuneko Taniuchi. Most were commissioned to make new works specifically for the exhibition. The result was an extraordinary diversity of works, which overlap and interact through their investigations into location, dislocation and cultural identity within the contemporary metropolis.
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