Take Me I’m Yours

After having become, for its reopening in October 2014, Paul McCarthy’s Chocolate Factory, then Marcel Broodthaers’s Museum of Modern Art – Department of Eagles, Monnaie de Paris invites visitors once again to rediscover its spaces thanks to an uncommon art project: Take Me (I’m Yours) transforms its 18th-century galleries into a venue of free and creative exchange, designed to overturn the conventional relationship between art and the public.

Twenty-one years after its huge success at the Serpentine Gallery, the exhibition conceived by Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Take Me (I’m Yours), is recreated. Visitors are invited, even encouraged, to touch, use, and take away objects and ideas from the show.
The exhibition curators, Christian Boltanski and Hans Ulrich Obrist, have revisited this founding principle and renewed it. Chiara Parisi, the director of the Monnaie de Paris cultural programs, has joined them on this occasion to offer a fresh perspective on the show. With more than thirty projects, the Paris exhibition is greater in magnitude and scope.

Displayed on the walls of the last factory in the centre of Paris, the exhibition is an invitation to revisit the myth of the singularity of an artwork and question its modes of production. Like coins, works of art are destined to be disseminated. This exhibition, designed as a place for interaction between visitors and artists, is characterised by its open form which evolves in time. When it ends, the pieces will disappear, having been distributed in their entirety. Challenging conventional economic channels, Take Me (I’m Yours) presents a model based on exchange and sharing, and thus raises questions about the exchange value of art, an issue intimately linked to Monnaie de Paris.

With each day that passes, it is the show’s visitors who will transform it. The exhibition extends beyond the rooms dedicated to it: artists will use the Google app to offer a virtual tour combining the exhibition’s past at the Serpentine in London in 1995, its present at the Monnaie de Paris in 2015, and its future – with forthcoming versions destined to travel further afield. It also makes its presence felt at the stand of a Parisian bouquiniste – a second-hand bookseller opposite Monnaie de Paris – and gets a breath of fresh air every day through the actions of the artists who surprise visitors during impromptu artistic interventions during the exhibition.

From the 16th September, alongside these events, the writer Federico Nicolao postes a daily report on the exhibition on Instagram (#kikerikidide).