Paris
Palais de Tokyo
Not the Paris Triennale of yesteryear, Okwui Enwezor’s ambitious “Intense Proximity” was a post-identity, post-national exhibition that argued for a common visual language shared by contemporary artists the world over, all similarly preoccupied with the complexities of the globalized world. Despite a veneer of identity politics reminiscent of shows from the ’90s, “Intense Proximity” was relevant to Europe now, as the Old World struggles to understand what happens when “the distance between the Self and the Other, between us and them, has collapsed.” The exhibition integrated early 20th-century ethnographic documentation in the form of film and photography with projects undertaken by contemporary artists, thus offering viewers a perspective on how we construct our understanding of the Other. The clearest example of such construction came in the video installation The Fourth Wall, by German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer, which was projected in the cavernous depths of the unfinished Palais. …see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine.
