Days are Dogs — Carte blanche à Camille Henrot — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 18, 2017 → January 7, 2018

Palais de Tokyo is delighted to offer French-born international artist Camille Henrot (b. 1978 in Paris, lives in New York) its third Carte Blanche exhibition.

Titled “Days are Dogs”, Henrot’s exhibition questions the relationships of authority and fiction that determine our existence, and is organized around one of the most foundational structures in our lives — the week.

Years are measured by the journey of the Earth around the Sun; months derive from the position of the Moon; days correspond to a rotation of the Earth. The week, by contrast, is a fiction, a human invention. Yet that does not diminish its emotional and psychological effects. We experience it as a narrative cycle, structured by the particular qualities of its component days.

Each room of the exhibition evokes a day of the week — an open world where conventions, emotions, and individual freedom are playfully confronted with one another.

Our days take their names from the cosmos and mythology — the Moon for Monday, the god Thor for Thursday, the god Saturn for Saturday — and the viewer is invited into a new human mythology, both contemporary and timeless: a mythology from the Internet age, where emotions are marked by each day’s hashtag. The exhibition as a whole operates through the composition and recomposition of archipelagoes of artworks — works by Camille Henrot herself, some of them presented for the first time, as well as those by international artists with whom she entertains a dialogue, broadening the scope of each day.

Born in Paris in 1978, Camille Henrot lives in New York. She received the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, the Nam June Paik Award in 2014 and is the 2015 recipient of the Edvard Munch Award. She has had numerous solo exhibitions in international institutions, including: Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, 2017), Fondazione Memmo (Rome, 2016), New Museum (New York, 2014), Chisenhale Gallery (London, 2014 — first iteration of the touring exhibition “The Pale Fox”). She recently participated in the Lyon (2015), Berlin and Sydney (2016) biennials. She is represented by kamel mennour (Paris/London), König Galerie (Berlin) and Metro Pictures (New York).