XIIth Biennale de Paris – Paris Biennale – International Young Artists Event

  • Paris, France
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Modernity means daring to invent, it means using all the potential of present time, and connecting information, creating an effect of synergy between the most recent and the most remote data; it means using the imagination as a tool that can shape reality. Modernity is the enemy of academicism.

Being modern means having a sense of history, knowing that ‘the present moment of bygone days is no longer the present moment of today’.

Being modern, in fact, means calling our desire for truth into question, rejecting the obvious.

The question of modernity is in effect linked to the question of History.

 

 

Excerpt from ‘La modernité: critères et repères’, an essay by Jean Nouvel, in La Modernité ou l’esprit du temps, François Barré, Patrice Goulet, Damien Hambye and Jean Nouvel, Paris: Edition l’Equerre/Biennale de Paris, 1982.