It All Comes Back to the 'Body' in Bourse de Commerce’s Latest Show
Featuring the likes of Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans and more.
The human body stands as, perhaps, one of the earliest sources of artistic inspiration. Traditionally used to explore ideas of holiness, beauty and virtue, the 20th century saw a turn in interrogation of flesh form, shifting toward conversations of identity and performance to forge a language for the many ways we move throughout the world.
A new exhibition at Paris’ Bourse de Commerce, fittingly titled Corps et âmes, explores how modern and contemporary artists approach this connection between the body and soul. Drawing one hundred works from the Pinault Collection, the exhibition spotlights corporeal articulations across painting, sculpture, photography, video and drawing, featuring the likes of 40 notable names, such as Arthur Jafa, Duane Hanson, Ana Mendieta, David Hammons, Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Kerry James Marshall, Sherrie Levine and more.
Central to the presentation are three films by Jafa, making their Paris debut. In the institution’s Tadao Ando-designed rotunda, Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016), one of Jafa’s most prominent works, transforms the space into a “soundboard” for icons and moments in Black American history. Featuring the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, Jimi Hendrix, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Miles Davis, Barack Obama, and Beyoncé, the film braids “celebrity and anonymity” to highlight the physicality of the body as a means of dance, violence and labor.
“Art seizes the energies and vital flows of our thoughts and inner lives to create a socially committed, humanist experience of otherness,” explained curator and collection director Emma Lavigne. “Forms metamorphose, returning to figuration or freeing themselves from it, to grasp, hold on to, and allow the soul and consciousness to reveal themselves. It is no longer a matter of merely painting bodies, instead capturing the forces that run through them, to bring to light what is buried and invisible, and to open up the shadows.”
Corps et âmes is now on view in Paris through August 25, 2025.
Bourse de Commerce
2 Rue de Viarmes,
75001 Paris, France
