Le Regard distant. A selection from the collection

Through about fifteen works from the MACS collection, the exhibition highlights the critical scope of an anthropological vision that embraces the near and the far, the familiar and the foreign, the center and the periphery. Through such a variation of focus, this optic adopts a double re-perspective that proposes a gaze both decentered towards elsewhere and, by reflection, distanced from itself, as if observed from the outside by an external eye. Putting into practice what Claude Lévi-Strauss, this "astronomer of human constellations", calls "the distant gaze", it is about these artists bringing the distant closer and moving the near away, illuminating one by the other according to a reformed humanism where the modern and the traditional, the rational and the sensitive, as well as progress and nature would henceforth be reconciled. Like Marcel Broodthaers's geopoetic atlas which brings the silhouettes of different states to an identical size to create an archipelago of similar alterities, this subversion of borders also implies a fight against ethnocentrism and the imperialist model of the "conquest of space". With globalization as a backdrop, many works presented here thus highlight minorities that acculturation, exclusion or immigration have affected for generations within territories often marked by a colonial history: from the Naxi of Tibetan origin in China (Emily Bates) to the Indians of Amérique du Nord (Jimmie Durham) passing through the young clandestine Comorians of the island of Mayotte. Tel le Tireur of thorn of Johan Muyle, diverted from Christian iconography into a tragic and ironic allegory of atonement, would contemporary art have the mission of warning us, like the anthropologist, of the fatal fate that awaits humanity from this gaze which, absorbed by the near, would have neglected the far? With works by: Adel Abdessemed, Emily Bates, Marcel Berlanger, Marie Bovo, Marcel Broodthaers, Jimmie Durham, Jot Fau, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Mekhitar Garabedian, Alexis Gautier, Laura Henno, Olivia Hernaïz, Alfredo Jaar, Tarik Kiswanson, Michaël Matthys, Johan Muyle, Emmanuelle Quertain. From 14.06 to 16.08 and from 06.09 to 01.11.2026 © Laura Henno