Through politically and socially engaged practices, the exhibition Hors de la nuit des normes, hors de l’énorme ennui envisages plural visions of love and friendship, of romance and desire, of bodies and sexuality. It brings together twenty artists and collectives who start from the margins to reimagine in the present the composition of affects and conflicts, of interpersonal bonds and collective creation. Love is here apprehended not only as a subject but also as a work ethic and an act of resistance to the normative boundaries that narrow our ways of experiencing our feelings.

Partly conceived and planned within “La Friche” during summer 2023 with a dozen artists and collectives, the exhibition is also the story of an original experiment within the Palais de Tokyo. Over the course of three months, artists and curators shared their critical references and their artistic practices with one another, in order to question the institution from within. How might an exhibition be inhabited and new relationships of complicity be imagined? How can love, tenderness, empathy and care be brought into our work relationships and practices?

In this way, rather than producing an exhibition that seeks to define and delimit the contours of a social or political movement, this project cultivates its multiple expressions and its elusive nature. We have sought to not only work on love but with it: to create a loving exhibition as much as an exhibition on the question of love.

Hors de la nuit des normes, hors de l’énorme ennui blends works and archives, contemporary and historical fictions. Poetry, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting and video take over the space and disseminate references to imagine deviant loves and more desirable futures. The title of the exhibition is borrowed from a banner that was unfurled in 1982 at the first lesbian protest to be organized in Geneva, which brought together around 250 people. The archives of the collective Vanille/Fraise, just like the works in the exhibition, enable us to envisage the historical links between certain political and social engagements as they dialogue across time even as contexts and words are continuously renewed.

Finally, the exhibition spills over into the pages of the Palais de Tokyo’s magazine, where the themes of the exhibition are extended through graphic and poetic contributions.