Exile has been the lot of humanity since its origins, as shown by the stories of Adam, Eve and Cain expelled from Paradise, or the Odyssey of Ulysses. Wars and disasters have thrown men onto the roads. The terrible picture of Flood by Antoine Carracci, with the panic-stricken men, alerts us to the climate exiles to come.
Embark at the Louvre-Lens for 20,000 places under the earth
Pablo Neruda said well what exile is: “Exile is round: a circle, a ring: your feet go around it, you cross the earth and it is not your land, the day wakes you and it is not yours, the night comes : your stars are missing, you find yourself brothers: but it is not your blood.”
A magnificent painting by Manet already shows a boat lost in the middle of the ocean.
Marco Godinho films a man who tears through the pages of the Odyssey and throws them into the water. Miriam Cahn paints migrants drowning in the misnamed Our sea
In a fascinating video, Kimsooja films herself from behind, loaded with the bundles of exiles slowly advancing through the streets of Paris.
Barthélémy Togo carved large wooden stamps like those of customs officers closing the borders.
Kader Attia, shows the power of repair: “The strength of repaired objects is to be impure, hybrid. Traditional cultures say that things do not have to be perfect unlike ours which favor the dogma of purity.”
The martyr city
The video by Albanian Adrian Paci shows immigrants, filled with the hope of somewhere else, boarding a plane that will not come.
The exhibition recalls, with a superb painting by Ford Madox Brown, the ten million workers who had to flee Great Britain between 1815 and 1914 to find something to live on.
Many artists suffered exile like Victor Hugo who wrote “Will I no longer see anything of all that I loved? Evening falls within me, O earth, whose summits the mist erases, am I the specter and you the grave?”
Other artists experienced the hell of the camps, including in France where Spanish exiles and then “undesirable foreigners” were locked up. The drawings of Antoine Clavé bear witness to this, as do the paintings of Felix Nussbaum (absent from the exhibition).
gull: Person I carry within me all the dreams of the world.
Exile is omnipresent in 2025 with what anthropologist Michel Agier calls “encampment”. Mathieu Pernot’s reports bear witness to this, as does Laura Henno’s film which shows the moving dialogue between an old Comorian and a child to whom he teaches how to try to escape to a better place.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige tell, as they did at the last Kunstenfestival in Brussels, the dizzying history of Orthosia, the Roman city found and reburied.
The exhibition thus returns to the ravaged Middle East with the impressive model by Syrian artist Khaled Dawwa which strikingly shows the Ghouta district in Damascus, after the deadly sarin gas bombing ordered in 2013 by Bashar al Assad.
Let’s leave the last word to Fernando Pessoa: “I am nothing. That said, I carry within me all the dreams of the world. “
New Time Gallery
Since the opening of the Louvre-Lens in 2012, the Galerie du temps has been its heart: 3,000 m2 in a single large, gently sloping room with 250 masterpieces from the Louvre, dating back to 4000 BC . until the 19th century. The free access gallery allows a fascinating journey through the history of art.
All the pieces have just been changed for the first time in twelve years and 250 other masterpieces are being shown in a “river of time” with pieces as famous as the four seasons by Arcimboldo, a superb God Amon, an avenue of Sphinxes, a delicious child by Goya (a painting which belonged to Yves Saint-Laurent), the young martyr floating in the river by Paul Delaroche, Love and Psyche by Canova, etc.
The Louvre in Lens, a formidable audacity rewarded
Particular care has been taken to show examples of African, Asian and pre-Columbian art. There is also an emphasis on women artists and some contemporary artists like Simone Fattal and the South African Zanele Muholi who closes the course with a large sculpture of a reclining woman.
Exiles, Louvre-Lens, until January 20
