An installation of anonymous works from the collections of the Mucem, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques, the Musée d'Arts de Nantes, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, the Rodin Museum, the LaM in Villeneuve d'Ascq, and the Palais Fesch - musée des Beaux-Arts in Ajaccio.

Faced with unauthored works, does the spectator become freer in their artistic, sensory experience? 
Without being distinguished in any way and laid out on the floor, reproductions of paintings, photographs, drawings, craft works, and design objects dating from the 17th to the 21st century are unveiled by artist Alexandre Perigot, who in this exhibition explores the broad spectrum of the question of anonymity. 

This installation entitled "My name is nobody" refers to cinema and mythology. This title refers to Tonino Valerii's famous spaghetti western, as well as to the character Mr Nobody from Jim Jarmush's film Dead Man and the cunning of Ulysses who, escaping from the cyclops Polyphemus, declared his name as "Nobody" in Homer's Odyssey. 

In a society like ours, it is not easy to think of a work of art without its author. The economic stakes of the art market where the artist’s notoriety adds value,; the cult of the "star"; the evolution of taste towards an ever-increasing appreciation of the person through the work – all these social forces direct the interests of research towards the search for a name. However, museums keep in their collections a significant proportion of unauthored works, where the signature is missing or remains uncertain, and which can lead to a game of attribution and a taste for enigma.

Alexandre Perigot biography

Born in Paris in 1959, Alexandre Perigot "lives and works everywhere". Open to all disciplines (video, installations, photography, music, dance), he works to unearth the signs of our society’s performance-making by revealing "the back of the set". Faced with the illusion of a global culture, he infiltrates the saturated network of the images of performance, art, and communication, to reveal their lure. His often live installations borrow from the worlds of cinema, architecture, performance arts, sports, video games, and media. They establish a strong interaction with the public and through the playful dimension of the game reveal the artifices of a borrowed identity, the relationship that each of us has with the celebrity system, and the idealised image of a fetishised everyday life. Alexandre Perigot seeks to blur the codes of representation and shake up the established status of the image and the artist. 

—Assistant to the artist: Samuel Vialle
—Mucem curation: Marie-Charlotte Calafat
—Image editing: Enrico Floriddia
—Signage : L’Atelier

 

Initiated in 2017 during the Nantes edition of Voyage, the exhibition My Name is Nobody at the Mucem was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Cnap, the musée d’arts de Nantes, the musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, the musée Rodin de Paris, the CNEAI of Pantin, the LAM de Villeneuve d’Ascq et the Palais Fesch – musée des Beaux-Arts d’Ajaccio.
We warmly thank these institutions whose generous support made this project possible.

The Mucem warmly thanks its sponsors for their support and commitment: 
—Founding sponsors
—Corporate members of the Club Mucem

Practical information

Free entry to exhibitions from 29 June to 20 July 2020 (booking not required)