The History of Tears
When: 07.10.2026 12:00
Where: 48.862946, 2.342400
Organizer: Admin
Specifically designed for the Rotonde and the museum’s display cases, the exhibition “The History of Tears” (“L’histoire des larmes,” in French) by Barbara Kruger confronts visitors with an uninterrupted flow of words, phrases and commands, filmed sequences and voices.
At the heart of the museum, Tadao Ando’s curved walls become the support for monumental quotations borrowed especially from the literary works 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947) by Aimé Césaire, while the twenty‑four display cases of the Passage, transformed into luminous boxes, fill the space with dazzling commands written by Barbara Kruger (born in 1945).
Two videos also join this ensemble, reinstalled today in this new setting. Made and edited by the artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (United States), Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust was first presented in 1996 before being shown several times in different contexts, always linked to a textual environment. The works confront the visitor with a succession of faces, gazes and words where desire, domination, fear and violence intermingle. Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Barbara Kruger creates a total work where the intimate and the political, the body and language, clash in a hypnotic vortex whose impact resonates today with striking acuity.
“An infinite flood of eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust. A reservoir that fills through domination and conquest, on a global scale as well as on a domestic one. A fountain that erupts in moments of great violence and brutality, but also at the heart of the most intimate cruelties. It can be triumphalist in its magnitude, or murmur, like a petty melodrama studded with caricatures of grotesque seduction and rejection. It is a bodily production both memorized and forgotten. It is a body in tears, lost amid the rubble of battles fought for money, land, love and other bodies. Mapping this emotional fountain, placing it in its historical context, leads to speaking of the deep struggle between the powerful and the powerless, the loved and the unloved, the winners and the losers. It reveals shame, pride, conviction and doubt in an intensely threatening and tragically comic way. It can show us and tell us how we were, how we are and how we will be to each other.”— Barbara Kruger,
about “The History of Tears”.
Commission: Matthieu Humery, photography advisor to the Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, project manager.
Tags: installation, exhibition, art
Source: https://www.paris.fr/evenements/the-history-of-tears-117725
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