Cloud of Petals, film 16mm numérisé, Sarah Meyohas, 2017, droits réservés.

The Nuée Vivante exhibition takes a look at the collection through the prism of Sarah Meyohas’s Cloud of Petals.  The title of the exhibition evokes the collection itself: a highly diverse entity with 800 works from 1929 to the present day, a body of work that is constantly evolving, complex and alive.

‘Nuée’ is also a reference to ‘cloud’. Through measurement, surveys, statistics, the life sciences, geology and the notion of progress, it has been possible to identify, assess and quantify almost all the phenomena and objects that make up the world, and to observe their changes over time. Methods of recording and transmitting data have also reached a climax: the translation of the world into ‘data’, making it possible to preserve and communicate every aspect of it, seems to be undergoing nothing but expansion and growth. DNA, bodies, flora and fauna are gradually being catalogued, coded and recorded.

In the video Cloud of Petals, Sarah Meyohas shows 16 employees digitising 100,000 rose petals in the former Bell Laboratories, a breeding ground for research and innovation in telecommunications and digital technology since 1925.

In resonance with this dystopian film, works from the municipal collection are brought into dialogue, tackling the question of life, the domestication of nature and our relationship with the world from a different perspective.  Artists from the collection in the show include: Ghazale Bahiraie, Tatiana Bailly, Niloufar Basiri, Loriane Bouhier, Agnès Geoffray, Léa Habourdin, Safia Hijos, Mari Minato, Constance Nouvel, Sarah Sandler and Lison Valier-Brasier.

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