Ulla von Brandenburg is a German artist born in 1974 in Karlsruhe and based in Paris since 2005. Her work is characterised by a diversity of means and media that answer to one another and which she stages according to different exhibition spaces. Perfectly mastering the codes of scenography, nourished by literature, the history of the arts and architecture but also psychoanalysis, spiritism and magic, she derives as much from esoteric rituals and popular ceremonies, as from the mechanisms and codes of the theatre, to explore the construction of our social structures. Masks, costumes, sets and props coming from different popular traditions thus allow her to transgress symbolically norms and hierarchies by subtly mingling reality and appearances in theatrical presentations. Her internationally recognised work has appeared in numerous solo shows, currently at the Palais de Tokyo until September 13th, 2020.

There is no shortage of female figures in Lothar Hempel’s work (born in 1966 in Cologne). Here they are clearly identified, already mythologised. In his series “Plakat”(poster in German), one finds three Jodie Fosters, at different stages of her early days in cinema.

Like a DJ, the artist-composer cheerfully mixes materials, disciplines and references. Going from American sitcoms to the big names of cinema, touching on installation, painting and collage evoking Matisse’s cut-outs as well as Dada posters, his approach is not so much an appropriationist attitude, but more of a tribute to a generation and its political and aesthetic commitments. He extracts, cuts and assembles to recompose new pieces of art that are always open to an infinity of interpretations, since they support a multitude of imaginaries.

Adam McEwen was born in London in 1965 and lives and works in New York. The artist moves freely between the disciplines of painting, sculpture and installation. He is well known for his lifesized graphite sculptures of such familiar consumer objects as an ATM, a water fountain or a credit card, his ‘’Bomber Harris’’ series - monochromatic paintings covered with chewed gums - and his prints on sponges claim both archival aspect and nostalgic imagery, creating a strange mix of historical gaze and subjective feelings. His compositions with three-dimensional objects tend to trigger a psychological unease, or to write a narrative which is uncontrolled and defined by the viewer, not unlike montage.

Ryan Gander was born in 1976 in Chester (United Kingdom). Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the artist assembles seemingly disparate objects, actions and texts to develop his own narrative systems. Characterized by conceptual rigor, visual simplicity and allusive text, Ryan Gander's works probe the processes of emergence and the mechanisms of perception entailed by the work of art. Installations, photographs, performances, publications and press inserts are his means of following up a train of thought concerning art's discursive potential and its transmission systems. His practice, which makes extensive use of language and work with other artists, aims at “making the invisible visible” and providing the “possibility and preconditions for things to happen”.

Your Nostalgia plays with the ideas of presence and absence. Ryan Gander’s own sports shoes have been cast and a bronze sculpture reproducing them has been created. Presentedon the floor, the piece is part of a narrative, this one more autobiographical. The artist usesthe architecture of the exhibition space itself, like missing parts of a story that he then fillswith works resembling fictional characters.

Mark Geffriaud was born in 1977 in Paris. Based on the production of installations, sculptures, films and performances the work of Mark Geffriaud focuses on the construction of time and memory. The apparition (circulation) and disappearance (oblivion) of images and forms prepares the ground of a fragmented archaeology in which misunderstanding as a cognitive process plays a great part. Free associations, formal comparisons and false fictions allow the artist to share a kind of subtle and shifted perception of the world. Mark Geffriaud’s works suggest an absence and tends to draw the outline of a universe that the viewer is invited to fill up with his own projections.

Jiří Kovanda (born in 1953) has been one of the outstanding conceptual artists of the Czech art scene. He organised his first performances in public environments in Prague in the mid-1970’s. His minimal actions, all based on a detailed scenario, were all recorded through photography in black and white and instruction leaflets.

In the eye of the artist, the work of art is made up of these documents, these performances having no other aim than the traces that are recorded. In his performances, those mundane actions appear slightly off-key, allowing us, through this combination of apparent simplicity and unbalance, to grasp at the individual and what remains real and human in a society under surveillance. After 1978, Kovanda staged minimalist and poetical interventions still recorded through a photograph and a text while the artist vanished completely from his interventions which deal with the very notion of traces. In the 1980’s, Kovanda turned to painting before abandoning all artistic practices. His work was rediscovered only recently and Kovanda has been active again creating installations, paintings and performances as discrete still and poetical in which he strives to find beauty in everyday life and to map out a space where the individual can actually exist.

Mark Dion is known for exploring the culture of collecting, its politics, social history and psychology. Over the past few decades he has worked with the collections of Natural History Museums, Universities, Zoos and Art Museums, manifesting bold new arrangements with these which reference the cabinets of wonder of the Renaissance. His frame of reference if often an ecological one which forefronts anthropogenic challenges to the natural world. In some ways his work takes the form of a melancholic meditation on morning our lost natural world. Dion often employs humor to undercut the seriousness of his endeavor.

In A Cabinet of Wonder - World's End, Dion turns his critical eye on his own sculptural legacy as an artist who works with collections. The work explores elements of Dion's practice and thus forms a kind a artist's retrospective or even a self portrait. The decadent deserts, burnt archives marine debris featured in some of his previous project make a prominent appearance in this piece.

Born in Brest in 1962, Bruno Perramant lives and works in Paris. The artist’s oeuvre is deeply influenced by the history of art, literature and cinema. In his works he plays not only with colors but also words and narrative. Language holds an important place in his painting, relecting his interest in literature and poetry, but also his desire to trouble the perceptions of a viewer. Words act as a counterpart to visual interpretation, inscribed directly onto the canvas, or entering the field of perception through the titles Perramant gives to his works.

The presence of Otobong Nkanga in her work has been described by critic Philippe Pirotte as a "self-effacing catalyst, an invisible hand that sets the artistic process in motion".

This notion is made most explicit in In A Place Yet Unknown, a tapestry work that displays a poem written by Nkanga, as well as the process of its composition. The end of the woven textile is dipped in ink, which over time rises through the tapestry. In a Place Yet Unknown grows through a process of chromatographic contamination, floating, to quote the work, in the place between stillness and motion; solidity and fragility; yesterday, today and tomorrow.