metropolis m

When entering the Palais de Tokyo one is immediately attracted by a structure of myriad tunnels made by nothing but scotch. The visitors crawling through this plastic maze jumble and scream right across your head. This work, a ‘sensorial emotional experience’, is the first of 31 propositions that constitute the themed exhibition Inside, intended as ‘a journey inside the works’ and ‘into an inner world’.

A declaration like this always gets me on guard for romantic silliness of works evoking wombs, nests and grottos as an ideal place. However, this thought doesn’t come to me when I cue up to enter the mazy plastic web. When creeping through such a suspended structure, one doesn’t think of the distinction between works simply glorifying isolation and those fading the line between shelter and confinement. Not that stretching this duality guarantees interesting art. For instance, Hu Xiaoyan’s video installation No Reason Why presents a woman struggling in a cocoon – so perfectly playing out the distinction between protection and imprisonment that the work falls flat and becomes dreary.

A monstrous mishmash of scattered wood, debris, crushed caravan parts and flaccid bouncy castles by Peter Buggenhout breaks down sentimental notions of confinement in a much bolder way. Air is violently blowing to pump up the decayed bouncy castles. The structure is slyly bulging over Mark Manders atelier-esque installation. His work, as always appealing to seclusion and timelessness (it is as closed off in space as it is in time), is enclosed by semi-transparent foil. This element, one of the many kinds of delimitation used by works that deal with ‘closedness’, poses a clear curatorial problem. In the case of the pairing of Buggenhout and Manders some dialogue between the works is possible, but most of the time the works exhibited have closed themselves off. The artist decides over the ‘frame’ of the work, the direct surrounding becomes part of the art. This is completely logical: try closing something off without using any form of demarcation. Palais the Tokyo doubled up this logic by encircling the works once again, surrounding most works with a dedicated white cube. This is a standard operating procedure in most exhibitions, but the very theme of the exhibition makes one sensitive to the membrane, the outskirt, of the work. As Inside can’t thus be presented otherwise than in different closed white cubes, the visitor is wildly bounced from a work in one sealed room to another. That’s how most of the 31 (group of) works that make up Inside are presented: as different independent pages making up an encyclopedia, linked only by proximity in an imagined coherence.

The enormous exhibition (only a few institutes can host an operation this big) does stay true to its declaration, it is a sensorial and emotional experience. But where it blatantly proclaims to be ‘deep, troubling and unexpected’, I would add the word exhausting too. 31 different worlds put in one room after the other makes one long for… space. After Philippe Parreno took over Palais de Tokyo last year and presented just a few works over 22.000 square meters, the center is stuffed again.

In such an overload simple yet ambiguous works stick. Christian Boltanski’s L’homme qui tousse coughing up blood in an alley so loudly that it makes your bottom shake. Or Artur Smijewski’s Berek (The Game Of Tag), that shows naked adults playing the game of tag supposedly in a former concentration camp, and is so unsettling because it could also be the basement of an ordinary home. Suddenly questions of confinement are veritably transposed to an inside.

Inside curated by Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais and Katel Jaffrès, Palais de Tokyo, 20 October 2014 – 11 January 2015