Magiciens de la Terre : Retour sur une exposition légendaire / Annie Cohen-Solal; Jean-Hubert Martin

Magiciens de la terre represented a watershed moment in the history of the great exhibitions of the 20th century. From May 18 to August 14, 1989, in the exhibition galleries of the Center Pompidou and La Grande halle de la Villette, it brought together nearly six hundred works produced by more than a hundred contemporary artists. For the first time on a Western stage, half of the artists came from these geographical territories (Africa, West Indies, Asia, Eastern Europe, Oceania) hitherto ignored by the actors of a still all-powerful and ethnocentric Western world. . Jean-Hubert Martin, its curator, had conceived the project by meeting artists from these cultures whom he ironically described as "invisible" and castigated, in a resolutely anti-colonial political bias, “the commonly accepted idea that there is only creation in the plastic arts in the Western or strongly Westernized world. »Twenty-five years after Magiciens de la Terre, at a time when the visual arts are going through a period of accelerated globalization, the Center Pompidou is organising, starting in the spring of 2014, a series of events which aim to examine the genesis of Magiciens de la Terre in order to situate the exhibition in its context and to understand, in particular, the role it played in the process of geographical extension of the contemporary art market.

English; French