JÉRÔME SANS
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Jérôme Sans
Born in 1960, Jérôme Sans is a curator, cultural agitator, and director of institutions, known internationally for his pioneering and transversal approach to new models of cultural institutions and exhibitions.
Sans was the co-founder and co-director of the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 1999 to 2006, a model imitated all over the world, like an iconic playground for artists and the public. At the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (UK), one of Europe’s leading contemporary art centers, he built a diversified local and international program while reconnecting the institution with the British and global art scene, between 2006 and 2008. From 2008 to 2012, he was the director of the ground-breaking Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (UCCA), establishing it as the first private contemporary art foundation in China and the model for many private Chinese museum projects.
In addition to his publications, Sans was creative director and editor-in-chief of the French cultural magazine L’Officiel Art. He has curated numerous major exhibitions around the world, including the Taipei Biennial (2000), the Lyon Biennial (2005); major monographic exhibitions such as Li Qing at the Prada Rong Zhai Foundation in Shanghai (2019) and Erwin Wurm at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2022); as well as public installations such as on Place Vendôme in Paris with Alicja Kwade (2022) and more recently with Bernar Venet (2023). Since 2022, he has also been accompanying the development of Lago/Algo, located in the heart of the Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City, where he presented group shows entitled ‘Shake Your Body’ in September 2022 and ‘Desert Flood’ in February 2023.
Born in 1960, Jérôme Sans is a curator, cultural agitator, and director of institutions, known internationally for his pioneering and transversal approach to new models of cultural institutions and exhibitions.
Sans was the co-founder and co-director of the acclaimed Palais de Tokyo in Paris from 1999 to 2006, a model imitated all over the world, like an iconic playground for artists and the public. At the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Newcastle (UK), one of Europe’s leading contemporary art centers, he built a diversified local and international program while reconnecting the institution with the British and global art scene, between 2006 and 2008. From 2008 to 2012, he was the director of the ground-breaking Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (UCCA), establishing it as the first private contemporary art foundation in China and the model for many private Chinese museum projects.
In addition to his publications, Sans was creative director and editor-in-chief of the French cultural magazine L’Officiel Art. He has curated numerous major exhibitions around the world, including the Taipei Biennial (2000), the Lyon Biennial (2005); major monographic exhibitions such as Li Qing at the Prada Rong Zhai Foundation in Shanghai (2019) and Erwin Wurm at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade (2022); as well as public installations such as on Place Vendôme in Paris with Alicja Kwade (2022) and more recently with Bernar Venet (2023). Since 2022, he has also been accompanying the development of Lago/Algo, located in the heart of the Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City, where he presented group shows entitled ‘Shake Your Body’ in September 2022 and ‘Desert Flood’ in February 2023.
“Wherever I have been working in the world, I’ve always been living in between. Movement and challenges activate ideas.”
INSTITUTIONS
Lago/Algo, Mexico City
Lago/Algo is a new living and cultural hub located in the heart of the Chapultepec forest, the green lung of Mexico City and largest urban park worldwide. The venue, inaugurated in February 2022, was founded by Sans together with Cristobal Riestra (Owner & Director of OMR) and Joachim Vargas Mier y Teran (CEO, Grupo CMR).
By reactivating an iconic building of modernist architecture and concrete utopia that carries all the strength of its ambitions, this new major platform brings together the already existing future of the encounter between music, contemporary art, architecture, nature and gastronomy. The bar, restaurant, shared workstation and exhibition space housed together in the building unrolls a fluid, dynamic, open and perpetually shifting program accessible day and night.
Born from the gathering of different entities and individuals, Lago/Algo is a model of sharing and collaboration, a vibrant laboratory for new social and cultural models enlightened by the most radical contemporary practices. Standing in the green ocean of Chapultepec, it is a cultural beacon on the waterfront and a haven of peace to reinvent ourselves and the world.
“A utopian dream of the 1960s became a new reality in 2022, a place where after two years of lockdown, we can be reunited with nature and reconnected to time and art. A place to share, to live, to reinvent our future.”
Contemporary Art Foundation Emerige, Paris, France
As its artistic director between 2017 and 2020, Sans contributed to the development of the infrastructures of the future Contemporary Art Foundation initiated by Emerige within the Ile Seguin complex in western Paris. Composed of a contemporary art center, a multiplex of cinemas and a hotel focused on contemporary creation, this ambitious complex became one of the most important in Europe.
The 5600 square meter center was designed by Catalan architects RCR Arquitectes, winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2017. Multidisciplinary, the foundation puts into perspective the ways in which current art interacts with all fields of creation, mixing the young creation supported by Emerige since the creation of its Emerige Revelations Prize in 2014 with internationally renowned practices.
Ullens Center For Contemporary Art, Beijing, China
From 2008 to 2012, Sans was the director of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, establishing it as the first private cultural institution in China and the model for many private Chinese museum projects. Sans contributed to the development of a new economy around an ambitious program of exhibitions and events on an international scale with Olafur Eliason & Ma Yansong, Cao Fei, Liu Xiaodong, and Erwin Wurm, among others.
He collaborated with architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte to redefine the structure of the art center into a malleable exhibition space, housed in a former 1950s Bauhaus-inspired factory.
“The current generation of Chinese artists not only takes a new view of the contemporary world, but is also contributing to a veritable Chinese ‘cultural revolution.’”
Baltic Center For Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle, UK
One of Europe’s leading contemporary art centers has regained its prominent place on the British map, under Sans’s direction between 2006 and 2008.
Sans was able to establish a new dynamic with a diversified program, local and international, while ensuring a viable economy and reconnecting the institution to the British and global art scene.
Without a permanent collection, but with a historic location in a former flour mill, Sans has given a voice to artists from the local community by confronting them with major international productions such as those of Subodh Gupta, Kader Attia or Kendel Geers.
Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France
In 1999, Sans co-founded with Nicolas Bourriaud the famous Palais de Tokyo in Paris, establishing itself as a new model for 21st century institutions. Open from noon to midnight, the public could explore new ways of acting, thinking and living.
Sans and Bourriaud developed new financial strategies to promote artistic projects and support the operation of the institution. For the restoration of this immense space, he worked with the architects Lacaton & Vassal, and Stéphane Maupin for the restaurant.
In the span of six years, the Palais de Tokyo has welcomed more than a million visitors, allowing contemporary art lovers to discover new formats for the display of current creation and opening up democratic access to culture for a new public.
“I always believed that art is life, and life is art. So they are all one and cannot be separated.”
“Sans has grown the Palais de Tokyo within just a few years to France’s largest non-collecting museum of contemporary art and one of the most important arts institutions in Europe.”
EXHIBITIONS
Bernar Venet, La Parabole de l’Histoire, Place Vendôme, Paris 2023
Sans curated a monumental installation by internationally renowned French artist, Bernar Venet, on Place Vendôme. As a tribute to Venet’s work in public space, this installation uses the artist’s trademark geometric vocabulary and his favorite material: Corten steel.
Erected on the cobblestones, two Corten-steel Arc sculptures interact with the square’s barren geometric order. On one side, two methodically stacked and intertwined tilted Arcs (Arcs penchés) stretch towards the sky. On the other side, as a result of random forces, a series of collapsing Arcs (Effondrement) form a closed circle, like an agora that the visitors can enter.
From the celestial to the terrestrial, an alchemical combination of order and chance, the sculptures interact with each other, converging in their horizontality. At once ephemeral and durable, ordered and chaotic, Venet’s sculptures reflect the dualities inherent in artistic creation and existence.
“A monumental parable of history.”
Alicja Kwade, Au cours des Mondes, Place Vendôme, Paris 2022
Internationally renowned Berlin-based artist, Alicja Kwade, presents ‘Au cours des Mondes,’ curated by Sans. This installation sets a dialogue between new structures combining natural stone globes and endless concrete stairs with a set of natural stone spheres, a recurring motif for the artist. An initiatory journey in the public space, the installation questions our relationship to knowledge, the universe, and the mechanisms of power.
Faced with the attempts and failures of science and philosophy to explain the world and the place of man within it, Kwade bases her questions beyond rationality and anthropocentrism. The relation to things therefore changes: from the atom to the planet, forms are repeated and hierarchies fall.
In response to the ecological emergency, she does not warn of the destruction of the world over which we have no power, but calls for a reconsideration of individual priority in the light of a potential for collective transformation.
“Kwade’s work is very engaging – those spheres are like magnets. From old to young – everyone wants to touch because it gives you strength.”
“This installation highlights the drama of the line, the physical experience of matter, and the looming ecological emergency.”
Erwin Wurm, ONE MINUTE FOREVER, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, 2022
Curated by Sans and Marijana Kolarić, Erwin Wurm’s exhibition ‘ONE MINUTE FOREVER’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade is the first major solo exhibition of one of Austria’s most prominent contemporary artists in Serbia. Spread over the five floors of the museum, it is a survey of twenty years of practice, presenting a body of work from 1993 to the present, as well as significant new productions.
One of the most important artists of his generation, Erwin Wurm is internationally recognized for his unique way of having reinvented sculpture through performance, video, drawing and photography. In the 1990s, Wurm made a name for himself with the One Minute Sculptures, an ongoing iconic and now historical series of photographed performances in which he subjects his models or himself to paradoxical, cynical or absurd contortions and situations.
Li Qing, Rear Windows, Fondazione Prada, Shanghai, 2020
‘Rear Windows’ is an immersive and collaborative project conceived on site by the Chinese artist Li Qing as a specific storyboard, re-contextualizing the Prada Rong Zhai house and its history.
Between fiction and reality, the exhibition – curated by Sans – is an odyssey throughout all the different enclaves and spaces of the house, meandering inside and out. While playing with the absence of presence in an empty house, Qing activates a mysterious and vibrant new dynamism to the story and connects with our contemporary existence within the Shanghai of today – a territory filled with urban myths, legends and expectations.
“Li Qing initiates here a new form of poetry in Prada Rong Zhai, one which belongs to an imaginary society and that lives in its past dreams, but also within his own work of today, continually questioning: how to be closer to the reality of things?”
Yu Hong, The World of Saha, The Long Museum, West Bund, Shanghai 2019
One of China’s most celebrated female artists, Yu Hong’s exhibition at the Long Museum consists of a large comprehensive survey of her work titled ‘The World of Saha,’ a Buddhist expression of great importance to Hong’s personal reflection, meaning ‘the world to be endured,’ the world that is ours.
More than a retrospective, this exhibition – curated by Sans – is envisioned as an ‘introspective’ into her unique and wide-ranging vocabulary. Hong is primarily known for several series of paintings that she has developed since the beginning of her artistic practice, and this exhibition traces her evolution into new realms which encompass her painterly reflection through new approaches.
The exhibition unfolds her world as a visual opera developed here into four different acts, revealing several parallel universes that subdivide into distinct periods: ‘Time of Rebirth,’ her lifelong commitment to a series of ‘Portraits,’ ‘Half-Hundred Mirrors’ and ‘Witness to Growth.’
ELDORAMA, Tripostal, Lille, lille3000, 2019
Curated by Sans, ‘ELDORAMA’ stages the universal adventure of all Eldorados, which have the power to uproot individuals and entire peoples through a myriad of contemporary works borrowed from the four corners of the globe.
It divides it into three chapters, one for each of the building’s floors: 1. Dream Worlds, 2. The Rush, 3. New Eldorados. Interspersed by works that spark movement, while others offer themselves as ideal stations before moving on to other horizons, the journey develops into a narrative that is dynamic and epic, but also wild and violent, brought to life by the artists’ fascinated or critical viewpoints on the many Eldorados promised by our contemporary world.
Lyon Biennale, Experiencing Duration, 2005
‘Experiencing Duration,’ curated by Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud for the 8th Contemporary Art Biennial in Lyon, exhibits the works of 61 artists and includes 25 pieces commissioned by the organizers.
The Lyon Biennale is essentially displayed at 5 different locations: La Sucrière, the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Institute of Contemporary Art at Villeurbanne, le Rectangle and Fort Saint-Jean. It exhibits works from the 70s (Andy Warhol, Gordon Matta-Clark, Yoko Ono, Terry Riley) alongside contemporary artists (Kader Attia, Martin Creed, Spencer Tunick). Thus, the overall impact is both spatially and temporally broad. The works on display form a powerful collection of sensory experiences and invite active participation from visitors.
“If ‘Expérience de la Durée’ succeeds (and it does), it is because it offers alternative temporalities to the speedy capitalist trajectory that shapes so much of our lives.”
BRANDS
Cartier Art Dialogues: Beyond Boundaries, Auditorium du Louvre
Cartier held the second edition of its Cartier Art Dialogues series in Paris on May 16th, 2022. This international conference brings together pre-eminent creatives, curators and experts for a live forum in a dialogue of exploration.
The theme of this new chapter, ‘Beyond Boundaries,’ focusing on artistic interactions and creative processes, is explored by talents from all creative fields including music, cinema, architecture, gastronomy, performance art, painting and olfaction, and representatives from leading international cultural institutions.
Sans served as a panelist at the discussion, moderated by Amira Casar, which also featured Simone Menezes, Elizabeth Diller, Cai Guo-Qiang and Mariane Ibrahim.
Voyages Immobiles – Le Grand Tour, Diptyque, Paris
In 2021, for its 60th anniversary, Diptyque proposed Sans to curate an exhibition around the philosophy of the founding trio Desmond Knox-Leet, Yves Coueslant and Christiane Montadre.
Sans curated the exhibition entitled ‘Voyages Immobiles – Le Grand Tour,’ bringing together nine international artists: Joël Andrianomearisoa, Andreas Angelidakis, Johan Creten, Gregor Hildebrandt, Chourouk Hriech, Rabih Kayrouz, Ange Leccia, Zoé Paul and Hiroshi Sugimoto, in a historical place just renovated by Dominique Perrault.
Voyages Immobiles questions the extraordinary polysemy of ‘the journey’ in an age of global nomadism and in the period following the world’s sudden descent into global immobility. In the spirit of Xavier de Maistre’s ‘A Journey Around my Room’ (1794), which turned his enforced confinement into an experience conducive to daydreaming and introspection, the exhibition explores different forms of mental and aesthetic roaming – real, digital, mythical or imaginary.
“Sans tells a multi-scale story that gradually unfolds from a personal level to a global one, but also a means to escape the ordinary experience of another reality, and refresh our view of the world while stationary.”
Swarovski Digital Crystal, Beijing
Over the past decade, Swarovski’s design and architecture commissions have served as an experimental platform for leading figures in design to conceptualize, develop and share their most radical ideas. Building on this foundation, London Design Museum and Swarovski challenged a number of exciting talents in contemporary creativity to explore the meaning of memory in the digital age in an exhibition titled ‘Digital Crystal: Swarovski,’ which launched in London in September 2012.
Perfect Crossovers were commissioned by Swarovski to bring the landmark exhibition to China. From London to Beijing, the exhibition was transformed, and a Chinese chapter was created for Sans to commission works from top Chinese designers and adapt to the local audience.
Working with renowned architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, Perfect Crossovers invited rising and established Chinese designers Liu Feng, Shi Jianmin, Naihan Li and Song Tao to create their interpretation of the future of memory in a digital world. Their outstanding commissions joined pieces from the now-iconic London exhibition by Ron Arad, Maarten Baas, Arik Levy and Random International.
Le Meridien
From 2006 to 2012, Sans became the Global Cultural Curator for the hotel group, Le Meridien, which was acquired in November 2005 by Starwood Hotels & Resorts. With his new title, he became the initiator of the LM100 program, a community of creators that work to bring together 20 members specialized in design, art, cuisine, fashion and music in hope of revamping the brand’s expertise.
Furthermore, Sans established exclusive partnerships around the world, between Le Meridien group and cultural institutions, in order to offer unique and accessible experiences to their clients through a ‘laissez-passer’ staff associated with the UNLOCK ART program.
LM100 members include Sans; contemporary Chinese artists Chen Wenbo, Yan Lei and An Xiaotong; world-renowned artists Sam Samore, Joan Fontcuberta, Younès Rahmoun, Youssef Nabil, Michael Lin, Hisham Bharoocha, Lucy and Jorge Orta, as well as Yasemin Baydar and Birol Demir of mentalKLINIK; Marcus Kreiss, founder of the video art channel Souvenirs from the Earth; Linda Grabe, wine expert; Ralph Gibson, award-winning photographer; Andrea, illy coffee expert; Fritz Storm, master barista; Nicolas and François Bergerault, founders of Atelier des Chefs; Henri Scars Struck, award-winning French musician and composer; Fabrice Penot and Edouard Roschi, founders of Le Labo; Kiki Allgeier, aspiring filmmaker; Nick Dine, renowned furniture designer; and Richard and Rana Florida, founder and CEO of Creative Class Group.
“If you look properly, you will see that something is happening here, the energy, the dynamics of things, the presence. All of these artworks make the complete experience of moving through this lobby something unique.”
“Sans gives Le Meridien a greater access to emerging artists around the globe, and the ability to grow LM100 family further, thus keeping dialogues, discoveries and creations flowing."
URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Metro Station Pont Cardinet, Paris 2020
Frankfurt-based op-artist Tobias Rehberger was commissioned by Sans to design the entrance to the new Pont Cardinet metro station on line 14, inaugurated in 2021 in the Batignolles area of Paris.
The work takes its inspiration from Hector Guimard’s Art Nouveau originals and features multicolored metal panels. This new entrance has been integrated into a new building designed by MAD Architects (Ma Yansong).
Rives de Saône – River Movie, 2013
River Movie, one of the largest urban development projects in Europe, commissioned by Lyon Métropole, aims to redefine the banks of France’s Saône River. Under the artistic and technical guidance of Sans and Arter, this ambitious project is a closely interconnected blend of heritage, urban planning and contemporary art that extends nearly 50 kilometers along a landscaped stretch of riverside featuring 23 works of art by 13 internationally known artists.
In synergy with the landscape, each contribution is a collaboration between the artistic direction, the artist and the landscape designer. Arranged in sequences, like a film, the works resonate with their environment and its history to create new mythologies, like so many surprises that restore the magic to the river banks.
Polygone Riviera, Cagnes-sur-mer, France, 2015
Polygone Riviera, designed by the Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield group (Europe’s leading listed commercial property company specialized in shopping centers in European capital cities), is the first open-air shopping center in France; it opened in late 2015 in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Combining shopping with leisure areas, Polygone Riviera is also a cultural venue that focuses strongly on contemporary art.
Sans was invited as Artistic Director for Polygone Riviera to imagine the contemporary art program. The works of 11 french and international artists (Ben, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Daniel Buren, César, Antony Gormley, Noble & Webster, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Pablo Reinoso, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Wang Du) have been selected to be on permanent display at Polygone Riviera to rethink the way we experience our immediate surroundings. Their presence at Polygone Riviera helps to make these new public facilities part of a broader social and cultural dynamic.
“Art is no longer confined to sanctuarized – and well-defined – cultural spaces outside commercial spaces. On the contrary, it is now exhibited right in the middle of the shops.”
PUBLICATIONS
Daniel Buren: CRISS-CROSS
Sans is one of only 39 people who have contributed to ‘CRISS-CROSS,’ Roulette Russe’s monograph on Daniel Buren. The contributors have in common that their paths have crossed Buren’s at a formative time – for themselves as well as for Buren.
‘CRISS-CROSS’ tells Buren’s story through the voices of people he has collaborated with during the last 55 years; writers, curators, gallerists, collectors, colleagues, art critics who all had an impact on shaping his life and art. The written contributions are accompanied by a generous amount of captivating visual material referring to the projects Buren did through the selected collaborations.
Adel Abdessemed – Catalogue raisonné des cartons d’invitation
This book traces the artistic adventure of Adel Abdessemed, a major figure on the French and international cultural scene, through nearly 50 invitations to solo exhibitions from 2001 to 2019. Faced with all the convulsive movements of the contemporary world, Adel Abdessemed’s work is a form of political commitment or investment, in which it is a question of resistance and subversion.
Much more than a retrospective panorama of 20 years of career, it is an introspective within the work of the artist who reveals, through an exchange with Sans, an accomplice of the artist, a free and sincere reflection, made of anecdotes, or quotations on what the memories of these exhibitions inspire him. Looking into his personal archives, probing his memory, he becomes his own commentator.
About fifty invitation cards reproduced on both sides and views of exhibitions are placed in parallel, like so many indications of a rich international career. So many graphic microcosms that have also contributed to writing and punctuating the history of Adel Abdessemed’s career.
“When I work with an artist, it is never once. We collaborate recurrently. It is never flirting, but the chance to push our limits together long-term and learn something new.”
Cuba Talks: Interviews with 28 Contemporary Artists
Four years after diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States were re-established by Barack Obama and Raúl Castro on 17 December 2014, ‘Cuba Talks’ is the first book to focus on the extreme vital Cuban contemporary art scene.
By interweaving their two visions and cultural backgrounds with Cuban culture, Sans and the emerging Cuban curator Laura Salas Redondo reveal a vanguard selection of 28 artists who have been active since the 1980s, outlining a creative context still largely unknown and hard to understand. ‘Cuba Talks’ is a true immersion in the reality of the work of these artists through their own words.
In The Arab World…Now
‘In the Arab World…Now’ is more than an inventory of the new El Dorado of artists, collectors and art managers. In 1001 pages, Sans paints a vivid picture of an Arab world in full mutation, under the sign of art, design, architecture, photography, and fashion.
A veritable travel diary nourished by encounters and testimonials, this work in three volumes manages to restore the dynamism and pluralities of an eclectic region, overflowing with energy, by multiplying the points of view, from Casablanca to Dubai through Beirut.
A reflection on the complex place occupied by the Arab world(s) in the international landscape, with a desire to open up dialogue between East and West, ‘In the Arab World…Now’ is a journey in the immediate, exhaustive and successful, which presents itself as a ‘work in progress;’ a draft to be completed, therefore, in the image of the teeming universe that it outlines.
Purple
A regular contributor to Purple Magazine, Sans has published numerous texts and interviews with various artists and professionals including Doug Aitken, Chloé Wise, Julio Le Parc, AA bronson, Deana Lawson, Sarah Lucas, Anne Imhof and Chantal Crousel.
L’OFFICIEL Art
In 2012, Éditions Jalou (Paris) launched its own quarterly contemporary art magazine, L’OFFICIEL Art. As creative director and editor-in-chief, Sans made a clear reference in the inaugural issue to the incorporation of fashion into the art world, accompanied by a broad list of other forms of visual, performance, and culinary arts, all of which are meant to encompass this idea of living artistically.
Through the collaborative work of Éditions Jalou and L’OFFICIEL Art, Sans bet on a new generation of art publications, one in which art and artists narrate various expressions of contemporary creative culture, namely fashion, design and music.
JÉRÔME SANS
CXA
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