WRITTEN IN FRENCH
The imaginaries of the Mediterranean are multiple. This exhibition and its catalogue focus on the images that museums, through their collections, have strongly contributed to constructing since the eighteenth century.
Fine arts museums highlight the civilizations of the past, especially...
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WRITTEN IN FRENCH
The imaginaries of the Mediterranean are multiple. This exhibition and its catalogue focus on the images that museums, through their collections, have strongly contributed to constructing since the eighteenth century.
Fine arts museums highlight the civilizations of the past, especially Antiquity, and build a fantasized Mediterranean, from the Odyssey to Greek temples, Rome and Palmyra. Museums of ethnology, which appeared at a time when the phenomenon of colonization by European states was spreading to the south and east of the Mediterranean, were interested in distant societies, whether the distance was geographical or cultural. The sincerity of the scientific and human interest in the Other rubbed shoulders with the interests and undertakings of the colonial powers.
This distinction between fine arts museums and ethnography museums has tended to create boundaries between the objects they hold and the disciplines that study them. The exhibition attempts to go beyond these limits, in order to show the bridges, parallels and mutual influences that exist between them, and the richness of an approach that proposes to de-hierarchize and decompartmentalize collections and methods.
Like the exhibition, the catalogue is punctuated by the intervention of several contemporary artists, from Francis Alÿs to Théo Mercier, who question the museographic means of the production of images of the Mediterranean and highlight current environmental, geopolitical and migratory issues.
Exhibition at the Mucem from 5 June 2024 to 31 December 2026
French
208 pages / 140 illustrations
Co-publishing GrandPalaisRmnEditions / Mucem
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