Since its earliest acquisitions, the Francès collection has given a central place to critical and discursive works: those that examine the abuses of power structures, denounce social and economic excesses, and shed light on the fragilities of our modern democracies. Many of these works reveal a logic of engagement, struggle or resistance.

Everything is political! The Fondation Francès unveils a manifesto exhibition in which art explores the tensions of our world. From Sheng Qi to Spencer Tunick, from Subodh Gupta to Michael Ray Charles, more than thirty international artists offer an unflinching look at power, engagement and freedom. Installations, paintings, photographs and performances trace an incisive panorama of contemporary struggles and the many forms of resistance.

Everything is political! This cry, once chanted in the street, resurfaces here as an incitement, a refusal of indifference, a call to vigilance. Each work is an act of speech, a crack in the established order; placed there, it disturbs, it questions, it resists.

Everything is political! An emblematic slogan of May '68 and the protest movements of the 1960s-1970s, it resonates today at the heart of the Fondation Francès as an assertion that remains vividly alive. This ambiguous title questions the omnipresence of the political in our lives, our bodies, our identities, our actions and, more broadly, in every social fact, every production, every relationship. In the context of a contemporary art exhibition, this assertion, which calls for nuance, becomes a critical tool for examining the complex, at times conflictual, relationship between art and politics.

Everything is political! Rather than assigning the works an immediate activist function, the exhibition invites us to consider the way in which they draw on social and historical contexts to reveal a political dimension — one that lies less in their form than in the eye of the beholder.

https://www.fondationfrances.com/