4 October 2024 – 13 January 2025
Commissioners: Caroline Courrioux and Sam Stourdzé
After the exhibition Histoires de pierres (2023), the Académie de France à Rome - Villa Médicis continues its exploration of the elements and offers a journey around the theme of water through the works of nearly 30 international contemporary artists, including 10 pieces commissioned especially for the exhibition.
On earth and in the atmosphere, both element and resource, water constitutes us and overflows the world. Protean - rains, seas, pearls, dew, streams, clouds, fog and tears - it is the essential source of all life. Today diverted, drawn and polluted, water has become a vital issue of the current ecological crisis. But if water is the object of a conquest, the abyss still remain more mysterious than the Moon, dream territories, populated by fantastic monsters.
The exhibition follows the water cycle, from sungulfed civilizations to ritual practices through the murky waters of trade routes. The hybrid figure of the mermaid, in turn evil and protective, half woman, half animal, plays the role of guide to navigate between these worlds, from the depths to the surface. Its ambivalence resonates with that of water, a space of metamorphoses, between waters of youth and fatal waters.
The exhibition invites you to cross the different states of water through the eyes of the artists, from its representation to its political issues, from the good transformed into a resource to the metaphorical quest for its source. Diving into this liquid world opens a universe of contradictions at a time when the stories about the origins of water are mixed with those that conjure away the future times when it threatens by its flood and its lack, and when the level of the seas rises at the same time as the rivers dry up.
October 3, 2024
