1984–1999. The Decade

Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture paints the portrait of a generation of nomads, born between 1965 and 1977. "X" refers to the anonymity of a new cultural category, conscious of its own burst and of the end of heroic tales. Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is the obsession and soul of this generation of individuals whose life was marked by the advent of the Internet, the end of history and militancy, and the transition from the reproductive age to that of "unlimited" access.

This generation is also the first to revive, in art, remembered stories of pioneers and explorers, all kinds of spectres and holograms, disincarnated toons, images of man's first steps on the Moon and Armstrong's distorted voice. Together they define new ways of relating to the world; new forms of experimentation, transgression and re-appropriation which go against earlier (counter-) revolutions.

1984-1999. The Decade tackles a decade that defies definition and disaffirms past attempts to do so. Beyond decennial retrospectives and compilations, it is a biographical space composed of objects, sounds, voices, images, reflections and sensations.

The exhibition is a mirror-image of the spirit of the 1990s. It does not attempt to recreate an era nor to sanctify an ideal and lost age, but seeks instead to bring up to date the forms and procedures which anticipated today's artistic creation. Working from a survey of some of the 1990s' central figures, its purpose is to collect objects and sources which survived and inspired the decade, and to create new, non-hierarchical arrangements between art, literature, film, music, architecture and design.

Imagined by major international artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, the exhibition scape presents itself as an intermediate space, between city and nature, inside and outside, day and night.

Curator: Stéphanie Moisdon, art critic and independent curator
Exhibition scenography based on an artistic project by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster