Summer at the Palais
For this summer season 2025, the Palais de Tokyo literally opens up—both physically and symbolically
As an alternative to certain tendencies towards withdrawal, our institutions, more than ever, embrace openness. In other words, they must no longer be hermetic, aseptic and reserved, but rather open-air places in direct contact with their environment. This openness should be applied to various aspects: open to cultures, to varied topics and histories, to the most innovative forms and imaginations, to the most diverse audiences, and to the most disruptive questions—even to natural elements. The basic rules of architecture remind us that, to remain healthy and sustainable, all buildings must breathe—that is, maintain constant exchange with the outside world. A beautiful and edifying paradox: openness is the best protection.
Vivian Sutter - DISCO
In the summer of 2025, the Palais de Tokyo organizes the larger-scale ever retrospective of Vivian Suter, with around 500 paintings produced by the artist over the course of the last ten years in her garden located in Panajachel, Guatemala where she has lived since the 1980s. Immersed in this tropical environment, Vivian Suter’s gestural and colorful painting has gradually become a documentation of her surroundings. Her daily productions capture not only the artist’s gestures but also the traces of the surrounding flora and fauna, as well as the effects of the weather—an expression of a serene and lucid acceptance of the climatic conditions that shape our lives and the impermanence of art. Vivian’s works are untitled and undated and are displayed in every possible orientation within expansive installations—a pictorial jungle where unframed canvases overlap, stack, float in the wind. Often exhibited in public spaces, they find at the Palais de Tokyo, under its skylit gallery, a setting more akin to the street than to the protected space of a museum.
Thao Nguyen Phan - The Sun Falls Silently
This exhibition is Thao Nguyen Phan’s (1987) first monograph in France. The artist presents a selection of recent or newly produced works (videos, paintings, sculptures), focusing on various historical figures linking France and Vietnam. This is an opportunity to develop a polyphony of views on her country and its history, its past and present ghosts.
An important part of the exhibition consists of a dialogue between the work of Thao Nguyen Phan and that of Diem Phung Thi (1920-2002), to whom she began to pay tribute with “Reincarnations of Shadows” (Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, 2023 and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2024). The practice of this modernist artist, who lived in France for several decades, was multi-faceted (painting, sculpture, furniture, jewelry, etc.), culminating in the creation of an alphabet of seven modular forms assembled in a number of variations.
This invitation is part of an ongoing relationship with Thao Nguyen Phan: her work was presented at the 15th Lyon Contemporary Art Biennale, “Where Water Comes Together with Other Water”, in 2019 – on the initiative of the Palais de Tokyo’s curatorial team, which was in charge of its artistic direction.
Chalisée Naamani - Octogone
Chalisée Naamani creates “image dresses” from photographs she takes with her phone or from sources from the internet, which she then transforms into large digital collages and prints on various materials. For her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the artist has designed an in-situ installation using associations of images and composite sculptures that explore the many ways of constructing the body. For her exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, the Franco-Iranian artist let herself be guided by the flights of stairs and the seemingly incomplete geometric shape of the space. Perceiving in it a half-octagon and a distant echo of the Iranian zurkhaneh—a term that refers both to a sport and the gymnasium where this national discipline, akin to bodybuilding, wrestling, and resistance to enemy invasions, is practiced—she playfully embraces its forms and makes them resonate in new ways.
In the arena-catwalk-sports hall, she confronts, parades and interweaves a panorama of ways of cultivating a body. The body of her champion grandfather, the body she trains at the gym, and the body of the new-born baby she is nurturing, are all brought together in hybrid compositions that combine personal images with those excavated from the Internet—anonymous archives freely circulating on social networks and other history or self-help books. The images are bodies, and the bodies are images, which it is up to anyone to shape as they wish in order to exist, resist and live freely.
John Giorno - Welcoming The Flowers
Ten years after the exhibition presented as a declaration of love, Ugo Rondinone: I 🖤 John Giorno at the Palais de Tokyo, John Giorno’s poetry returns to the heart of the art center with an installation specifically designed for the building.
Poet, artist, activist, figure of the New York underground from the 1960s until his death in 2019, John Giorno devoted his entire life to making the creative act more democratic by imagining new ways of thinking about how art, poetry, performance, music, spirituality and activism can intermingle and mutually enrich each other. In the spirit of his Poem Paintings,in which phrases or words from his poems are printed in large, colourful capital letters on various supports, the Welcoming the Flowers installation unfolds across the windows of the main landing in the publicly accessible area of the Palais de Tokyo.
Designed by artist Ugo Rondinone, the installation transforms a selection of paintings from the Welcoming The Flowers series (2007), based on the poem of the same name, into a stained-glass window illuminated by sunlight. In this new version, the theme of flowers is linked to natural light, creating a vertical garden of light, colour and words that humorously celebrates love, sexuality, spirituality, social and political engagement.