Aurélie Filippetti, Minister of Culture and Communication, is pleased to announce that the next edition of MONUMENTA is entrusted to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Russian artists residing in the United States.
This sixth edition of MONUMENTA will be held at the Grand Palais from May 5 to June 22, 2014 and will be curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, internationally recognized curator of exhibitions.
Each year, MONUMENTA invites an artist of international stature to invest the 13,500 m² and 35 m of height of the Nave du Grand Palais, with an original work, specially designed for this space.
With MONUMENTA 2014, the Minister confirms her commitment and that of her Ministry to a demonstration that, thanks to an ambitious policy in favor of the public (admission fees, mediation, editions, cultural programming), allows a large number of visitors to discover contemporary art mixing all social backgrounds and all ages.
The first five editions of MONUMENTA have allowed an increasing number of audiences to see the greatest artists of our time taking up the challenge of the vastness of the Nave of the Grand Palais: poetic metaphor of the Universe with Anselm Kiefer, grandiose minimalism with Richard Serra, reflection on memory and forgetfulness with Christian Boltanski, intimate sensory experience with Anish Kapoor, and chromatic fireworks with Daniel Buren, the experiences were as strong as diverse, always successful.
With Gorod, that is City in Russian, the Kabakovs have chosen to play on both the grandeur of the forms and the exceptional size of the monument but also, with their characteristic malice, on another gigantism, that of ideas. Invited to Paris, the very city where, with the Soviet pavilion of the 1925 Exhibition, Rodchenko and Melnikov gave shape to the purest utopia, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov wish to evoke these great visions of progress, science and the elevation of man, that could have led to the brink of disaster.
Through spectacular and surprising installations, imbued with humour and poetry, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have built up over the years a sort of catalogue of illusions, where we see the human being working competently and relentlessly for more or less crazy achievements. In the image of this character who, having built a gigantic pile of ladders to approach his angel and throw himself in his arms, the work of the Kabakov shows man in his determination to rise.
The Nave of the Grand Palais will allow artists to give a new dimension to these concepts by making them more immediately visible to the general public. The «city» designed especially for the Grand Palais, even if it is full of references drawn from the Renaissance, romanticism or modern science, will be apprehended in a sensitive and concrete way, creating the sensation of entering a higher dimension. The stroll will reserve, at the detour of its «chapels» with the sacred atmosphere, moving moments.
MONUMENTA is an event of the Ministry of Culture and Communication whose production is ensured by the Meeting of National Museums-Grand Palace.