Curator: Mael Revaillot

Thursday, June 1 – Opening Exhibition

The PSYCHOTROPES exhibition erects links between the consumption of psychoactive products up to the hallucinogenic dimension among the ancestral populations of Melanesia, more particularly New Guinean, and the evocation of these effects. It attempts to represent a material and cognitive conceptualization of the interference caused by a state that then becomes paradoxical, where perception of reality and dreams intertwine.

The exhibition space receives at the beginning of its journey, about twenty ancient works of first art from the Pacific, more particularly Melanesian. Lime spatula, kava cup and effigy of an ancestor, come to feed under the ethnological prism, an exhibition treated under a largely botanical look (Betel, Kava, DMT, Salvia Divinorum). In resonance with this, 3 emerging artists, Anaïs Penot, Antonin Renard and Kelit Raynaud evoke this interference in new commissioned works, using different mediums.