Corps et âmes at Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection, Paris, France

Corps et âmes show from Mar 5 — Aug 25, 2025 | Foto Nicolas Brasseur, Pinault Collection, Paris, France

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With around a hundred works from the Pinault Collection, the Bourse de Commerce is presenting the exhibition ‘Corps et âmes’, an exploration of the representation of the body in contemporary art. From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Ana Mendieta, David Hammons to Marlene Dumas, Arthur Jafa to Ali Cherri, some forty artists explore the links between body and mind through painting, sculpture, photography, video and drawing.


"The Passage de la Bourse de Commerce is home to works by Ali Cherri, a Lebanese artist living in France. In his youth, he was marked by the civil war in Lebanon, and in particular by the spoliations, thefts and trafficking of works of art that wars engender. Using the twenty-four display cases, the museum's most important device for presenting objects, his work is also inspired by cinema and its twenty-four images per second: his sculptures are thought of as ghostly flashes in a liminal space between life and death, between the past and the present, inviting us to reflect on the age-old manipulation of cultural artefacts."
— Emma Lavigne, General Director of the Collection, General Curator

"'Then came the cinema to bring bodies back to life', writes Ali Cherri. The history of cinema is a history of the dead surviving in images. Cinema has always been about ghosts, whether for technical reasons (light projection, cross-fading), genealogical reasons (influences of phantasmagoria and the magic lantern), or above all poetic reasons (the characters on the screen die and are resurrected with each projection). By recording and preserving the traces of bodies, cinema thus becomes a means of bringing the dead back to life through the screen, awakening the souls of inert bodies 1 . In his film Somniculus (2017) shot in Paris, Ali Cherri seized on this spectral dimension of film by replacing the actors’ bodies with works of art and objects filmed in empty museums.

Reversing the recurrent analogy between museums and cemeteries, especially in the postcolonial context (Les statues meurent aussi, by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, 1953), Ali Cherri prefers to see these objects as temporarily asleep - Latin for light sleep, somniculus - and the museum as a dormitory 2 . Continuing this project, sculptures and artefacts arranged in the manner of miniature tableaux vivants slumber or awaken in each of the showcases in the Bourse de Commerce. [...] Combining archaeological finds with his own creations, he creates chimeras. 'The grafts I make in my series of sculptures are a form of solidarity between broken, fragmented and abused bodies, which, by joining together, create a community,' he says. These objects, resurrected or survivors of tumultuous pasts, scraps that museums have not deemed worthy of preserving, bear witness to countless exchanges and peregrinations: eyes torn from Egyptian sarcophagi, counterfeits when they become fashionable in European collections, fake curiosities and copies from Antiquity merge, as distant civilisations cohabit and take root in each other". — JeanMarie Gallais Curated by Jean-Marie Gallais, Curator, Pinault Collectio