The History of Tears

Pinault Collection presents in the Rotunda and the twenty-four showcases of the Bourse de Commerce an exhibition by American artist Barbara Kruger, “The History of Tears”.

Created specifically for the Rotunda and the museum’s showcases, the exhibition “The History of Tears” (“L’histoire des larmes” in French) by Barbara Kruger confronts visitors with an unbroken flow of words, phrases and injunctions, filmed sequences and voices.

At the heart of the museum, Tadao Ando’s curved walls become the support for monumental quotations borrowed notably from the literary works 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947) by Aimé Césaire, while the twenty-four showcases of the Passage, transformed into light boxes, punctuate the space with striking injunctions written by Barbara Kruger (born 1945).

Two videos, reinstalled today within this new display, are also woven into the ensemble.

Made and edited by the artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (United States), Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust was first presented in 1996 before being shown several times in different contexts, always linked to a textual environment.

The works confront the visitor with a succession of faces, gazes and words in which desire, domination, fear and violence intermingle.

Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Barbara Kruger creates a total work in which the intimate and the political, the body and language, collide in a hypnotic whirlwind whose significance resonates today with striking acuity. “An endless deluge of eyes.

A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust. A reservoir that fills through domination and conquest, on the global stage as much as on the domestic scale.

A fountain that gushes in moments of great violence and brutality, but also at the heart of the most intimate cruelties. It can be triumphalist in its scale, or drizzle, like a petty melodrama studded with grotesque caricatures of seduction and rejection.