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What do artists tell us about the world we live in? What image do they show us of our bodies, our land, our towns, our dreams and fears? The exhibition Brave New World offers an open and surprising reading of the world through a hundred artworks by more than ninety artists from the point of view of the Mudam Collection.
Brave New World is an exhibition composed exclusively of artworks from the Mudam Collection. It occupies the whole museum exhibition space which has been partially altered for the occasion. Mudam’s collection of contemporary art bears the fingerprints of Bernard Ceysson and Marie-Claude Beaud, the directors who have been involved in its constitution since the first acquisitions in 1996. It bears witness to a particular interest in artworks anchored in the contemporary world regardless of the techniques employed (painting, sculpture, photo, installation, video, etc). The exhibition also includes specially commissioned furniture by artists and designers and extends outside the museum with an installation in the ditches in the park.
The exhibition title refers to the famous science-fiction book by Aldous Huxley published in 1932. It allows Enrico Lunghi (the curator of the exhibition and director of Mudam) to offer visitors fragmentary and open stories that provide various possible “readings” of the world around us, through the artworks in the collection. Thus the exhibition is layed out in four parts, with a prologue and an epilogue, each introduced by a quotation from the book by Aldous Huxley. The section called “our faces” notably thematizes the way in which artists see and treat “human nature”, while the section “our artifices” deals with certain visions of our constructed environments. “Our territories” brings together artworks treating this theme in the most abstract and imaginary way, whereas “our inner life” evokes fantasies and fears of which art is often the depositary.