Shéhérazade, at Night

The exhibition, which takes place on level 1 of the Palais de Tokyo, brings together works by six artists: Minia Biabiany, Miguel Gomes, Ho Tzu Nyen, Pedro Neves Marques, Lieko Shiga and Ana Vaz.

Considering history as a construction site, one that is incessantly ransacked and reinvented, these artists oppose the powers of fiction to the fictions of power in an explicitly political confrontation. Their recourse to fiction, myth and fabulation is not to be considered here as a flight from reality or an easy escape route, but rather as a simultaneously weakening and reinforcing reality as a means of making and transforming beings and worlds. Faced with the omnipotence of rational thought and epistemological systems inherited from Western modernity, the works presented in the exhibition encourage us to take into account a multiplicity of perspectives. They attest to and invent a reality wherein historical facts, myth, political analysis, animism and the marvellous intermingle indistinctly, accommodating different modes of transmission and knowledge creation.

It is articulated around a series of solo exhibitions that respond to one other and constitute so many porous chapters between different geopolitical contexts: from Europe to Brazil, from the Caribbean to Japan and Southeast Asia. It is also accompanied by a cultural programme, a series of screenings and an issue of PALAIS magazine #34 offering a theoretical background and literary perspectives to complete the experience of the works.