The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’s new exhibition is bringing together a selection of works collected over the past decade by recently retired Museum Director Marie-Claude Beaud.
Villa Paloma is the setting for a new exhibit, ‘Tremblings – Recent Acquisitions of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco’, which showcases a hand-picked collection of works acquired by former Museum Director Marie-Claude Beaud, who left in April 2021.
The exhibition was the brainchild of Célia Bernasconi, Chief Curator of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM), and features works by 17 contemporary living artists, nine of whom are women, from 12 different countries. The common thread between the pieces is that the artists all had a similar response to the definition of “trembling thinking”.
It is summed up by French Caribbean poet Edouard Glissant, who said, “First of all, it must be said that trembling is not uncertainty, that it is not fear, that it is not what paralyses us. Trembling thinking – and to my mind, all utopia passes through this thought – is first of all the instinctive feeling that we must refuse all categories of rigid thinking and all categories of imperial thinking.
“Thought that organises itself into a system and tries to put order, its own order, into the world, is a thought against which we can raise this trembling thinking, which is the knowledge or the attempt at real knowledge of what is happening in the world today. In the Whole-World, everything trembles. The Whole-World trembles physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually, because the Whole-World is looking for this point, I would not say this station, but this utopian point where all the cultures of the world, all the imaginations of the world, can meet and hear one another without being dispersed or getting lost.”
After having directed institutions as diverse as the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, the American Centre, the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and the Mudam in Luxembourg, Marie-Claude Beaud developed her vision of the contemporary museum in Monaco inspired by the poetry of Édouard Glissant and his aesthetic of the Whole-World.
The collections of the NMNM have thus been enriched in a transdisciplinary and inclusive manner, and in constant dialogue with contemporary artists. While ensuring the study and preservation of works of art linked to the Monaco of the past and the modern era, the NMNM has developed a heritage that includes interesting contemporary art. Based on themes defined by taking into consideration the history of Monaco and its territory, its acquisition policy has made it possible to support and represent a great diversity of views and voices within the national collections.
Video installations, sculptures, paintings, and photographs by diverse artists Yinka Shonibare, Sylvie Blocher, Arthur Jafa, Helen Johnson, Clément Cogitore, Candice Breitz, Latifa Echakhch, Petrit Halilaj, Brice Dellsperger, Pauline Boudry, Renate Lorenz, Nan Goldin, Steve McQueen, Apostolos Georgiou, Hans Schabus, Katinka Bock and Laure Prouvost will offer visitors committed visions of the world and highlight the fragilities of society.
The exhibition will run through 15th May 2022 at the Villa Paloma.