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Current exhibition

Inviting artists, designers and architects to intervene in the context of a museum collection or historic monument is now a widespread practice, and a perilous but stimulating exercise. Our aim since the museum opened in 1998 has been to constitute a contemporary collection out of these ‘encounters’, that is, to work on a long-term basis with Jewish and non-Jewish artists, always in a spirit of open-mindedness, to create resonances with the objects and themes in the permanent collection.

Christian Boltanski inaugurated this programme with Les Habitants de l’hôtel de Saint-Aignan en 1939, a fragile monument vertically traversing the museum’s 20th-century wing. Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Arik Levy and Michel Nedjar were invited to work on the festivals of the Jewish calendar, whose themes have nurtured their work in often surprising ways.

The relationship to the book, the written word and language has almost naturally been the framework for many of our commissions and acquisitions. Micha Ullman created five Sand Books for the museum collection, and Serge Lask and Judith Bartolani contributed works associating memory and the compulsive practice of writing.

The Prix Maratier, awarded every two years by the Fondation Pro-Mahj, has given us greater freedom, enabling us to integrate into our collection works as different as those by Max Wechsler, Pierrette Bloch, Iris Sara Schiller and Mikael Levin, after fascinating debates with juries attentive to the complexity and specificity of our task.

The Nuit blanche continues to be an annual opportunity to commission a work for the museum’s courtyard. Kader Attia and Antoine Grumbach are just two of the artists who have accepted this challenge. This ongoing project has progressively enriched the collection with emblematic works, which have been complemented by gifts by the artists, collectors and organisations, and also loans, notably from the Fonds national d’art contemporain. The aim of the selection of works shown here is to create echoes with the permanent collection and its themes, particularly the written word.

Contemporary art is ‘infiltrating’ the permanent collection this summer, and, by highlighting some of its aspects, also inviting us to revisit it.


Artists
Kader Attia
Judith Bartolani
Pierrette Bloch
Christian Boltanski
Philippe Boutibonnes
Sophie Calle
Gérard Garouste
Moshe Gershuni
Antoine Grumbach
Anne-Valérie Hash
Mikhail Karasik
Moshe Kupferman
Serge Lask
Mikael Levin
Arik Levy
Deimantas Narkevicius
Michel Nedjar
Iris Sara Schiller
Micha Ullman
Max Wechsler
Boris Zaborov

Curator : Nathalie Hazan-Brunet

Aide à la visite

Brochure d'aide à la visite
of the exhibition A journey through the MAHJ's Contemporary Collection