Le Regard éloigné

Bringing together some fifteen works from the MACS collection, the exhibition underscores the critical reach of an anthropological vision that embraces the near and the far, the familiar and the foreign, the centre and the periphery. This shift in focus produces a double reframing: a gaze turned outward towards elsewhere and, in turn, estranged from itself as though seen from without by a foreign eye. Putting into practice what Claude Lévi-Strauss, that 'astronomer of human constellations', calls 'the distant gaze', these artists seek to bring the distant closer and push the near further away, to illuminate the one through the other. Theirs is a reformed humanism where the modern and the traditional, the rational and the sensuous, and progress and nature, are at last reconciled. Just as Marcel Broodthaers' geopoetic atlas reduces the outlines of different states to the same scale, creating an archipelago of kindred othernesses, this subversion of boundaries is also a struggle against ethnocentrism and the imperialist model of the 'conquest of space'. Against the backdrop of globalisation, many of the works presented here forground minorities who have been affected for generations by acculturation, exclusion or immigration within territories marked by a colonial history: from the Naxi of Tibetan origin in China (Emily Bates) to the Native Americans of North America (Jimmie Durham), and the young undocumented Comorian migrants on the island of Mayotte. Like Johan Muyle's Tireur d’épine (The Thorn-Puller), wrested from Christian iconography to become a tragic and ironic allegory of atonement, does contemporary art have a mission to warn us – much like the anthropologist – of the fatal destiny that awaits a humanity whose gaze, absorbed by the near, has neglected the far? 

Featuring works by: Adel Abdessemed, Marcel Berlanger, Marcel Broodthaers, Marie Bovo, Emily Bates, Jimmie Durham, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Jot Fau, Mekhitar Garabedian, Alexis Gautier, Laura Henno, Olivia Hernaïz, Alfredo Jaar, Tarik Kiswanson, Michaël Matthys, Johan Muyle, Emmanuelle Quertain.

14.06 > 16.08 and 06.09 > 01.11.2026

© Laura Henno