ROYAL ARTS VISIONS; The New National Museum of Monaco presents Agora, The Museum Square LAB #3

The New National Museum of Monaco presents the cultural program imagined as part of its new exhibition:

Agora

The museum square LAB #3

until May 4, 2025, at the Villa Sauber

The LABs invite visitors to consider the museum as a "laboratory" in which its missions (collecting, studying, distributing, producing, preserving, transmitting) are the subject of reflection, experimentation and innovation. In 2015, the NMNM initiated its first LAB and exhibited "behind the scenes of the museum".

In 2018, five artists were invited to question the very definition of the museum. In 2025, at the dawn of a vast structural transformation of the Villa Sauber, the NMNM proposes to give pride of place to its public programs that put artists and transmission at the heart of their challenges.

On the one hand, the works acquired since 2017 as part of the "Apprentice Collectors" program will be exhibited in correspondence with works from the heritage collections, on the other hand, visitors will be able to discover the productions of Léna Durr and Éléonore False, artists recently invited to a creative residency.

Finally, by inviting Olivier Vadrot to design a new architecture, this LAB will offer a space for discussions and collective experiences within the museum itself. A cycle of meetings, screenings, and performances will be hosted there throughout the exhibition, allowing new projects to emerge. “The Traveling Collection”, “The New Digital Museum” or even the current residency of Léa Collet will be the subject of regular workshops, as will the “Écoletopie” project by the smarin studio, which will take the form of a mediation lounge for the occasion. A collaborative publication will also be produced during the exhibition with Éditions Empire.

Léna Durr

(artist in residence in 2022-2023)

In her photographs, videos and installations, Léna Durr stages her collection in its most intimate form. Accumulations, repetitions, the worthless objects that she has been buying since childhood have formed the corpus of her work until she became interested in the collections of others.

During her creative residency, Léna Durr looked at the African art collection, built up from the 1950s by Georges

Jessula, donated to the NMNM in 2006 and preserved since then. She wanted to reveal it to the public in the form of a fictional interior combining a selection of statuettes, masks and jewelry with a decor largely borrowed from the Drapier collection donated to the Principality in 1956. A frieze composed of archives, artificially generated images and photographs taken during his residency replays that of the production to be found online.

Léna Durr, Ceux-là viennent de la forêt, 2023. Photographie numérique. Courtesy de l’artiste

The Georges Jessula Collection

The collection of African art at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, born from the passion of Georges Jessula, is distinguished by its touching history. Discovering African art during a stay in Senegal, Jessula, then Honorary Consul of Monaco, developed a passion for objects loaded with symbolism and culture. For nearly twenty years, he traveled to markets and craft workshops to build a unique collection, rich in masks, ritual objects, jewelry and utilitarian pieces. Not only a collector, Jessula strives to understand the use and meaning of each object. At the end of his life, he classified his heritage, aware of its importance. In 2006, his sons, Daniel and David, offered the collection to Monaco in tribute to the protection the family received during the Second World War. This donation symbolizes memory and recognition. Today, this collection is an integral part of Monegasque cultural heritage, testifying to the dialogue between art, personal passion and universal history.

The Pierre Charles Henri Drapier Collection

In 1950, Pierre Charles Henri Drapier (1875-1950) bequeathed his precious collection of furniture and curiosities to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Monaco. Few details are known about the life of Drapier, who had settled in Nice in 1936 to spend a peaceful retirement there with his wife.

With no descendants, he meticulously organized the transmission of his heritage, making an initial donation to the City of Nice in 1946, before designating Monaco as heir to the rest of his collection. This collection reflects the spirit of enlightened collectors of the 19th and 20th centuries,

combining aesthetics, history and curiosity. It consists of furniture, tableware, everyday objects and various weapons, including exceptional Japanese armour, which bear witness to the craze for exoticism and cultural exchanges of the time.

Today preserved at the New National Museum of Monaco, this collection embodies the legacy of great private collectors,

combining artistic and ethnographic value. Through his legacy, Drapier enriched the public heritage, transforming his attachment to the past into a precious resource for cultural transmission and sharing.

Léna Durr, Chez Daniel, Paris, 2023. Photographie numérique. Courtesy de l’artiste

“Approaching a traditional African sculpture, going through its details, smelling its wood perfumed with the essence of time, touching its patinated surface, cannot free oneself from the question of when and how certain objects are present here, outside the territory that saw them born and brought them to life. At a time when the question of restitution is at the heart of debates in many countries of the South as well as in the West, how can we account for a collection that would seem to be part of another genesis? What does it mean to do so in a way that is detached from any cultural affiliation, but on the basis of the act of collecting as a praxis? What about its digital restitution, its access methods, and the way in which these condition the relationship to the work? »

Excerpt from « What the object says about itself » Christine Eyene, 2024 to be published in the exhibition publication

Léna Durr’s production bringing together photographs, sound recordings,

texts and personal archives will soon be accessible via the NMNM website

Eléonore False

(artist in residence in 2023-2024)

Éléonore False gleans images that she classifies and then transforms into collages, even sculptures.

As part of her residency at the NMNM, she wanted to focus her attention on a set of Tissier dolls. Éléonore False photographed this collection to compose collages and sculptures from her enlarged shots. In a mirror game with the Tissier couple, the artist proposed to commission a musical work from the composer Nicolas Mollard, her partner, in order to create this immersive installation.

“The installation is a scene whose main characters

are the result of a process of metamorphosis of the dolls.

Éléonore False chose to focus her creative process

on the part of the body where life is best expressed and which establishes the

singularity of each: the heads and faces. »

Excerpt from “Ombres Roses Ombres” by Kathy Alliou, 2024. To be published in the exhibition publication.

Éléonore False, Ombres Roses Ombres #2, 2024. Collage réalisé à partir du fonds Gisèle Tissier-Grandpierre, collection du Nouveau Musée National de Monaco . Courtesy de l’artiste. © Éléonore False / ADAGP, Paris, 2024.

The Gisèle Tissier-Grandpierre Collection

The Nouveau Musée National de Monaco holds a collection of dolls designed by Gisèle Tissier-Grandpierre (1896-1988), a designer active in the social circles of the 1920s. Alongside her husband, Paul Tissier (1886-1926), renowned for his prestigious evenings organized in Nice, she helped shape the festive world of this era. Between 1924 and 1926, the couple orchestrated 117 remarkable events, during which unique dolls were offered to guests as souvenirs. After Paul’s death in 1926, Gisèle continued this activity, making dolls combining antique fabrics and faces painted by the caricaturist Sem, with the help of talented craftsmen. Inspired by historical or imaginary characters, these creations also included life-size works and hybrid objects, such as doll cushions. In 2005, a donation allowed the museum to preserve this unique collection, a testament to Gisèle’s creative talent and the excitement of the Riviera’s festivals during the Roaring Twenties.

Anonyme. Image d’archive du fonds Gisèle Tissier-Grandpierre, collection du Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.

THE APPRENTICES COLLECTORS

This educational program, initiated in 2017, aims to familiarize teenagers with contemporary art, as well as with the primary mission of a museum: collecting.

Throughout the year, first and final year art majors at the François d’Assise-Nicolas Barré and Albert-Ier high schools follow a series of meetings, discussions, visits and workshops that raise their awareness of the challenges of a museum, the functioning of the art market and the NMNM collections.

During a contemporary art fair, students, with an acquisition budget of €20,000, select one or more works and argue the relevance of their proposal before a jury. The selected work then enters the museum’s collections.

All the works acquired since the beginning of this program are thus exhibited on the upper floor of the Villa Sauber, in correspondence with works from the heritage collections.

This year, the final year art students from the Albert-Ier high school will visit the ARCOmadrid art fair. The jury selection committee will be held on Wednesday, March 26. This program is supported by SOGEDA, Société pour la Gestion des Droits d'Auteurs de Monaco.

François du Perier du Mouriez, Ruines de Palmyre, s.d. Vue d’optique. Encre et aquarelle sur papier vélin, ciré et tendu sur châssis périmétrique, grattages et découpe avec empiècement de papier vélin fin. 64 x 95,7 cm. Collection Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, n° 1958.2.

David Medalla, Mask, 2017. Page de magazine découpée, 25 x 19,9 cm. Collection Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, n° 2023.10.5. Acquisition réalisée dans le cadre du programme pédagogique « Les apprentis collectionneurs » avec le soutien de la SOGEDA (Monaco). Photo : Galleria Enrico Astuni.

Kees Van Dongen , Masque « vache », s.d. Encre de chine et gouache sur carton découpé, oeillets métalliques et cordelette, 21 x 37 cm. Collection Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, n° 2022.1.1. Photo NMNM / François Fernandez, 2024

Public program

Program of events as part of the exhibition “AGORA, La place du musée”*:

February 13: Le Cantique des oiseaux, performance and screening in the presence of the artist and director Katia Kameli

February 27: Performance and public discussion with Lidwine Prolonge

March 10: Conference with Laure Prouvost, artist and videographer.

April 1: East of noon Screening in the presence of the artist Hala Elkoussy.

April 10: Conference by Olivier Vadrot, artist and designer

April 24: État Naturel / Nature Artificielle, conference-performance by Léa Collet, guest artist in creative residency

April 29: Professional meeting day: “Mediation mediation spaces and supports”

*Other events will be announced during the exhibition.

THE CANTICLE OF THE BIRDS

Performance and screening in the presence of the artist and director Katia Kameli

Thursday, February 13, 2025 – 6:30 p.m.

Villa Sauber, 17 Av. Princesse Grace, 98000 Monaco

At once sculptural, graphic, musical and performative, The Canticle of the Birds is a reinterpretation of the famous mystical tale written at the end of the 12th century by the great Persian poet Farîd od-dîn’Attâr. This emblematic tale of Sufism describes the initiatory journey of birds, led by a hoopoe, symbol of wisdom, in order to discover the incarnation of the divine, named Sîmorgh.

For this performance, the stoneware bird-instruments, made in collaboration with the ceramist Marie Picard, will be activated during a walking performance in the Villa Sauber. It will be followed by a screening of The Song of the Birds, a variation produced in 2023, and a meeting with the artist.

The practice of Katia Kameli, a Franco-Algerian artist and director, is based on a research approach: historical and cultural facts feed the plural forms of her plastic and poetic imagination. She considers herself a “translator” and highlights a global history, made of porous borders and reciprocal influences in order to open a reflexive path that generates a critical view of the world. Her work is exhibited at the Centre Pompidou until March 10, echoing the figure of Pierre Bourdieu and his images of Algeria in the exhibition Penser par l’expérience photographique. A monographic exhibition will also be on display this summer at the Chateauvert art center in the Var.

FOLLOW THE WHITE PARROT. STORIES AND OTHER TOURS,

Performance and public discussion with Lidwine Prolonge

Thursday, February 27, 2025

5 p.m.: Departure of the performance at Monaco Tours, opposite the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. (Duration: 40 minutes).

6:30 p.m.: Conference at the Pavillon Bosio, École supérieure d’arts plastiques de Monaco, 1 Av. des Pins, 98000 Monaco.

Each tourist city has its own little train. Often, the locomotive is a reduced version of those of the past that pulls a few wagons of passive strollers. The tour, offered in several languages, goes to the essentials. It is structured around the main monuments, the highlights of the history of the places. Between each sequence, background music makes the time pass.

At the invitation of the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Lidwine Prolonge imagined her “grand tour” of the principality. To the sound of her voice, in a circular tracking shot, she weaves cinematographic and literary references with anecdotes and happy coincidences. She invites us to reconsider the evidence of a landscape that has already been fictionalized many times. The work Follow the White Parrot. Stories and Other Tours was acquired by the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco in 2024.

By mobilizing practices such as performance associated with hypnosis, video installation, photography, object displays or even writing, Lidwine Prolonge’s work tends to establish a continuity between personal events and collective history, in order to create the conditions for a disturbance in our relationship to perceived, experienced and thought situations.

Laure Prouvost © Photo by Gene Pittman, courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

In conversation with Laure Prouvost

A conference by the Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation

Monday, March 10, 2025, 6:30 p.m.

Théâtre des Variétés, 1 Bd Albert 1er 98000 Monaco

The Prince Pierre of Monaco Foundation is organizing a meeting between the artist Laure Prouvost and Mathilde Roman, art critic, author and professor. This event will be an opportunity to explore the major questions and essential themes present in the artist's recent works.

In her films, frescoes and performances, Laure Prouvost brings humans and plants together, creating joyful hybridizations where otherness generates new shoots. In her stories, languages connect, form new meanings, project imaginaries inspired by the contexts of the exhibitions as much as the personal fictions that she deploys

over time.

Since 2022, Laure Prouvost has worked on several major projects, including the exhibition Above Front Tears Oui Float, a reflection on global warming, in which she imagines another possible future. This exhibition was presented in Oslo, then in the United States and the Netherlands. In 2023, she created a series of films and an installation entitled OMA-JE, which addresses the figure of the grandmother and questions the transmission of history across generations.

This work has been exhibited, among others, in Vienna, Montreal and Melbourne. Finally, in 2025, Laure Prouvost will inaugurate two new major exhibitions: in Berlin, with the LAS Art Foundation in February, and at the MUCEM in Marseille in April.

In 2023, after several stays in Monaco at the invitation of the NMNM, Laure Prouvost, who lives and works in Molenbeek (Belgium), proposes to establish an informal and sensitive correspondence between these two territories. MoMo (Monaco – Molenbeek) is a play on words, an imaginary space that breaks down boundaries to connect energies and invent possibilities.

Screening of the film East of noon in the presence of the artist Hala Elkoussy.

Tuesday, April 1, 2025 – 7 p.m.

Théâtre des Variétés, 1 bd. Albert 1er

The NMNM and the Audiovisual Institute of Monaco have chosen to collaborate by programming the creations of artists whose practice is halfway between cinema and contemporary art: films that are unique in their forms, their narrative system, but also in their mode of production and distribution. For this 2024 - 2025 season, the Tout l’art du cinéma program of the Audiovisual Institute of Monaco and the NMNM present the film East of Noon. In the first part, Hala Elkoussy will present her work as a filmmaker and visual artist.

"With East of Noon, Hala Elkoussy takes us into a folk tale that oscillates between The Thousand and One Nights and Ubu Roi, [...] where wonderful young people try to survive the autocracy of an infantile tyrant. This second feature film by Hala Elkoussy stands out with its wacky, unusual and bizarre form within African and Arab cinema and recalls the classics of the 60s and 70s." Firouz Pillet, j-mag.ch, May 24, 2024.

"After studying at the American University in Cairo, where she was born in 1974, and a master's degree from Goldsmith College in London in 2002, Hala Elkoussy distinguished herself in the field of photography and produced several short films that were presented in contemporary creation venues around the world: the Istanbul Biennale, the Tate Modern and the Centre Georges Pompidou. In 2004, she founded a collective of visual artists and two years later took up a residency at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. In 2013, Elkoussy published a photographic journal on urban life after the Egyptian Revolution. Her first feature film, Cactus Flower, which had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival in 2017, continued this work of topography, focusing on the lives of two women trying to survive in a Cairo city on the verge of collapse. Like a cactus flower, both hostile and seductive, the city occupies a central place in the construction of the film, not to say that it plays the leading role, with the two heroines only managing to overcome their daily lives and their distress by taking refuge in their imagination, materialized by musical interludes, sung or danced, in the great tradition of Egyptian cinema. At the heart of this film is a great actress of Arab cinema, Menha El-Batrawi, who can be found in Hala Elkoussy's second feature film, East of Noon (2024), presented at the Quinzaine of the last Cannes Film Festival. The action of this fable-film takes place in a fantasized Egypt, where the characters, struggling with a tyrannical power, owe their freedom only to their ability to invent roles and stories for themselves, to literally throw themselves into the water, since it is the sea that here represents a possible elsewhere. Full of oppositions and contrasts, the film does not hesitate to explore the extravagances of reality, the meanders of desire, the tricks of truth, guided, in its most successful moments, by an irrepressible drive for life that recalls certain accents of Youssef Chahine's cinema. Enough to make us want to follow the cinematographic trajectory of this artist."

Vincent Vatrican

Crédit : Olivier Vadrot.

Ancient theatres and mobile museums, meeting with Olivier Vadrot, artist and designer

Thursday 10 April 2025 – 6:30 pm

Villa Sauber, 17 Av. Princesse Grace, 98000 Monaco

As part of the exhibition “AGORA: The Place of the Museum”, the New National Museum of Monaco invites Olivier Vadrot to a public discussion around his research on ancient theatres and the production of mobile structures. The conference will be held in Kerkis, the agora conceived and designed by the artist as a space for discussions, exchanges and debates.

Olivier Vadrot lives and works in Beaune, Burgundy. His career was determined very early on at the crossroads of many fields: architecture, design, curating and exhibition scenography, the theatre and music scene.

Alongside his studies at the Lyon School of Architecture, he embarked on the collective adventure of the Pluzdank Theater (1996-2001). He co-founded the contemporary art center La Salle de bains in Lyon (1999) and then the Cocktail Designers group (2004), within which he designed several listening devices for music labels (Le Kiosque électronique, 2004; Icosajack, 2007). His stay at the Villa Medici as a scenographer (2012-2013) marked an important turning point in his career.

His personal practice has recently asserted itself by refocusing on micro-architectures that allow for assembly (Faire c’est dire, 2017), shaping the collective (Les Tribunes, 2015), and catalyzing debates (Cavea, 2016).

While some of these devices are nomadic, reproducible and ephemeral, reduced to essential forms and made of inexpensive materials, others have been more permanently established in public spaces (Conversations, 2018; Orchestre, 2018; Les Fossiles, 2020). A first monographic work, entitled Mêlées, was dedicated to him in 2020 by Catalogue Général, Paris.

Léa Collet, recherches en cours ; résidence 2025 NMNM.

Natural State / Artificial Nature,

Conference-performance by Léa Collet, guest artist in creative residency

Thursday, April 24 – 6:30 p.m.

Villa Sauber, 17 Av. Princesse Grace, 98000 Monaco

This conference-performance entitled “Natural State / Artificial Nature” presents the ongoing research of Léa Collet’s residency at the NMNM, which explores the interactions between the natural state and the artificial state. Through an approach based on collaboration and symbiosis, Léa explores the links between the Monegasque landscape, its representations in the museum’s collections, the history of the Jardin Exotique de Monaco, and the imaginary garden that she is developing in collaboration with an artificial intelligence and two groups of Monegasque middle school students. Particular attention is paid to the way in which these dimensions can feed each other, thus opening new perspectives on their coexistence and mutual enrichment.

Léa Collet lives and works in Aulnay-sous-Bois, she also has strong ties with London. Her artistic practice - protean and reflexive - speculates on the interconnections between botany, emotions, territory, transmission and technology. Through installation, performance or film production, she proposes new imaginaries, presenting themselves as new anchors or new collective identities. Her interest also focuses on the coexistence of natural and artificial intelligences. Her approach is alive, constantly changing, a continuous empirical creation that feeds on her wanderings through co-creation.

Léa Collet recently received the “SIGG Art Prize” award. Her work is presented at the 68th edition of the Salon de Montrouge as well as at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, in the group exhibition: “Échos du passé, promesses du futur” until July 13, 2025.