From 8 November 2024 to 16 February 2025, the Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum project presents the exhibition “Another Avant-garde. Photography 1970-2000”, featuring the highlights of the photography collection of the Centre Pompidou. Exhibition partner: SIGMA.

 

 

For the first time in decades, key works from the period between 1970 and 2000 are presented together to revisit the established story of photography’s success in the art world. Precisely by juxtaposing wildly different works, from small conceptual pieces to large tableaux, from single photographs to experimental video works, the exhibition proposes to look at the wide spectrum of artistic possibilities of the camera. Whether as sculpture, performance, moving image, or in recourse to painting, photography has become an important tool for artists from different backgrounds. In its selection of works from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and China, the exhibition expands the hitherto Eurocentric narrative of art photography and sheds light on common concerns of artists from diverse social and cultural contexts.

 

 

The exhibition puts special emphasis on works from China, supported by a number of loans that establish a dialogue between different histories of the avant-garde. The Centre Pompidou thus continues the stimulating encounter of its collection in the different host countries of its partnerships.

 

 

The exhibition begins with a view back on the first avant-garde of the 1920s, whose originality, playfulness, and self-reflexivity are echoed in what is presented as another avant-garde in the following galleries. The exhibition continues with documents of performance art and Conceptual Art and thus acknowledges the importance of other artistic practices to popularization of photography in the 1970s, but it also makes clear the tremendous technical and conceptual influence of photography on these practices. The subsequent galleries demonstrate this symbiosis in artworks that both deconstruct and reconstruct the photographic apparatus and image. Select works from the collection of new media underline the parallel experiments in video art, making the connection between the still and moving image, and the mechanism and performativity of the camera. The genres range from portraiture, landscape, appropriation art, sculpture and analytic photography, displaying the diverse spectrum in which artists worked and interrogated the potential of visual representation. With the grand tableaux of the 1980s and 1990s, the parcours arrives at a decisive development of art history: the return to figuration.

 

 

After decades of the primacy of abstraction, photography offered artists the means to turn again to the physical world. However, rather than relying on a straightforward documentary style, artists explored the intricacies of the complex creation and reception of images and their importance in society. The exhibition concludes with an outlook on contemporary photography and digital media in a continued interrogation of the status of the photographic image.