Historic Contemporary and Forgotten Museum opens in Paris
The Prada has announced the “24 h Museum,” designed by Francesco Vezzoli with AMO, Rem Koolhaas’ think tank. The “24h Museum” opens in Paris on Tuesday, 24 January for 24 hours only, till Wednesday, 25 January, in the historic Palais d’Iéna, the building designed by Auguste Perret between 1936 and 1946, today home of CESE (Conseil Economique, Social et Environnemental), the French ‘third Chamber’.
AMO’s installation for the “24 h Museum” is divided in three sections, each inspired by a particular type of museum space: historic, contemporary and forgotten. The three sections are instrument to the sequence of events that take place during 24 hours in different areas of the ground floor of the Palais d’Iéna. The central space is a large metal cage made from grills and neon lights that encloses the work by Francesco Vezzoli.
In the three sections–historic, contemporary and forgotten–Vezzoli is creating a “non-existent museum” where he shows his personal tribute to the eternal allure of femininity through interpretations of classical sculptures that make reference to contemporary divas. “They are my icons turned into sculptures and placed on marble pedestals”.* At the top of the stairway, epicentre of the building, Vezzoli is placing a majestic sculpture of a female, reinterpreted with the features of a mysterious goddess. Vezzoli’s vision is of a museum that exists for just 24 hours and which is also a celebration of a collective rite that mixes visitors, red-carpet, Oedipus’ complex and night visions.
With the new “24 h Museum,” Francesco Vezzoli is continuing his exploration of reciprocal influences and boundary-breaking in the visual arts, cinema and theatre that he has already investigated in the performance in which Veruschka did petit-point embroidery at the Venice Biennale in 2001, the Democrazy video in which Sharon Stone and Bernard-Henri Lévy represent themselves as characters of a fictitious political campaign for an hypothetical presidential election (Venice Biennale, 2007), and in Lady Gaga’s performance at the MOCA in Los Angeles in 2009 when she played a live tribute to Diaghilev.
In its tradition of working with artists and making multiple approaches to the creative process–with a unique capacity to embrace utopias like The Double Club (London, 2008-09) and the Prada Transformer (Seoul, 2009)–Prada realizes with Francesco Vezzoli a new project of visual and linguistic experimentation in the “24 h Museum”, a Baroque festival in which the entire exhibition lasts only 24 hours.
The “24 h Museum” opens on Tuesday, 24 January with an invitation-only dinner. At 11:00pm it is turned into a disco-club visible online at the site www.24hoursmuseum.com. The next day it is open to the public from 7:00am to 12:00pm and from 2:00pm to 4:30pm. Some guided tours for schools take place in the afternoon, followed by a closing vernissage from 6:30pm to 8:30pm. When the 24-hour period ends at 8:30pm on 25 January 2012, the “24h Museum” created by Francesco Vezzoli and AMO closes.
A conversation on this project between HUO and FV will also be included in the brochure published for the opening of the “24Hours Museum”.
*Francesco Vezzoli in L’Espresso, 21-12-2011, p. 119.
Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, Italy, 1971)
studied at Central St. Martin’s School of Art in London from 1992 to 1995. His works have been exhibited in many institutions, including: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, “The Films of Francesco Vezzoli” (2002); the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin (2002); the Fondazione Prada, Milan (2004 and 2005); Museu Serralves, Porto (2005); Le Consortium, Dijon (2006); the Tate Modern, London, “Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story (Part One)” (2006); the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009-2010), “Dalí Dalí Featuring Francesco Vezzoli”; the Kunsthalle Wien (2009), “Marlene Redux: A True Hollywood Story!”; the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (2010). His recent performances include “Right You Are (If You Think You Are)” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007), and the “Ballets Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again)”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009) with contributions by Lady Gaga and Frank Gehry.
Francesco Vezzoli lives and works in Milan.
AMO/OMA
is a world-famous office, led by Rem Koolhaas, active in the fields of architecture, urban planning and cultural analysis. AMO (the research division of OMA) crosses the traditional boundaries of architecture for all disciplines. AMO has developed an integrated model of services that has allowed Prada to investigate the nature of luxury and exclusivity. OMA was in charge of producing scale projects for Prada’s future exhibition centre in Largo Isarco in Milan, and the Ca’ Corner della Regina, the eighteenth-century palazzo where the Fondazione Prada has opened its exhibition space in Venice.