An artist, who is travelling, cannot walk around with their hands in their pockets. Wherever they may be, they maintain their uninterrupted dialogue with the objects they need and find, as with those they produce. However, where there is much content, there must also be some kind of container. This is how the ambiguous precedence of the suitcase was born. A tool of travel, its recurring appearance could not leave its users indifferent. When, in a moment of inspiration, the Box in a suitcase allows Marcel Duchamp to transport his entire work, the cabin luggage itself acquires a new status. It is a reduced model of the artist’s thinking that is tidy, packed and transportable.

In less organised circumstances, the suitcase may also simply become empty – i.e., out of service. Then Duchamp’s irony gives way to Chiharu Shiota’s poetic reflection, in which the memories of those who carried suitcases gather like a wave, and whose installation takes on the form and regular, endless movement.

From 1936 onwards, Marcel Duchamp produced many copies of Box in a suitcase, which contained small-scale reproductions of his works. While widely disseminating his work to interested collectors, Duchamp also wanted to play with the authenticity that was supposed to give value to a work of art, by producing copies of his own work himself at a time when technology made this easy.

The Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota marks the contemporary artistic landscape with her monumental installations composed of intertwined wool yarn, and which demonstrate a rare poetry. The theme of travel, which she threads as a metaphor here, is represented by many worn, empty suitcases, suspended from red threads and animated by a slow wave-like movement. The work symbolises a questioning often present in her work. What material and psychological memory does she preserve of her past to make it emerge today? Do the memories carried by these suitcases build us up or rather prevent us from moving forward?

From the north of the Mediterranean to its south, either shore faces the other and interacts. Their history lives on in agreements and conflicts – and art is no exception.

In the 1910s, European artists, seeking powerful and unusual light, found them far from their own homelands, to the south, attracted by its dazzlement. Albert Marquet experimented there with the shape and lines of cities. Wassily Kandinsky let the whiteness of light simplify the image of streets – silent and smooth. Paul Klee fed on a palette of colours that moved towards abstraction.

When a new generation came to represent the crossing in the opposite direction a few decades later, it was in pursuit of diametrically opposed motivations. The luminous image was the response to a daily experience of dreams and shortages. Leila Alaoui and Zineb Sedira speak on behalf of all those to whom the materiality of borders continues to be opposed. From an impalpable reality, art moves on to aspirations for a living freedom for all. No matter what the canvas or watercolour, what you need is to be a passport holder.

Between 1902 and 1907, Wassily Kandinsky’s early works are often multicoloured and inspired by the Russian tales from his childhood. During a trip to Tunisia at the end of 1904 with Gabriele Münter, and after a stint in Lyon and then Marseille, Kandinsky created a number of works in which his use of coloured spots to represent trees and fabrics is clearly recognisable. But the play of colours temporarily fades and the presence of characters becomes more discreet, while the traditional Tunisian whiteness of facades becomes omnipresent.

In 1914, Paul Klee, August Macke and Louis Moillet made a long journey together to Tunisia. Klee was deeply influenced by the light and colour he discovered there. At the entrance of Kairouan, he wrote in his diary: “Colour possesses me. I don’t need to look for it anymore. This is what this happy moment means: I and colour are one.” Colour then becomes a constituent element of his works, in increasingly simple and geometric forms, until it reaches abstraction.

The title of this series of photographs is based on the famous slogan of the Republicans during the Spanish War: “No pasaran” (“They will not pass”). Taken in various places in Morocco, the country from which Leila Alaoui’s father originated, these photos follow the story of local youths who dream of another life elsewhere, each telling of the daily difficulties of the characters represented and their desire to emigrate, to leave these lands and seek a better future. But as the title No Pasara indicates, this migration is often impossible.

To travel is also about travelling in time, with no possibility of return. To look forward is to look at the future. Thus, Victor Brauner’s last voyage did not evade any divinatory intention, even dark ones. When it took place in 1937 at the dawn of the historical abyss that was about to swallow humanity, it can be seen today as a palpable visionary moment, symbolically spread over a wooden panel similarly to the religious paintings of the Middle Ages.

The Second World War then pushed Max Ernst to cross the ocean to America, then to travel almost the entire breadth of the continent to land in Arizona, where he could appropriate the slow calm that only the desert had and make it a lighter, much less detailed work than what he had previously been accustomed to. Without dematerialising surrealism, Ernst reduced it to the simple expression of a horizon between dog and wolf, that time and mankind watch, without ever being able to reach.

After having joined the surrealist group in Paris, Victor Brauner returned to Romania from 1935 to 1938, where made Le Dernier Voyage. The disturbing aspect of the landscape and the fantastic characters that appear there, along a road running towards the setting sun, recalls what André Breton already said about Brauner in 1934: “Desire and fear preside par excellence over the game he leads with us, in the very disturbing visual circle where apparition is in a twilight battle with appearance.”

Max Ernst fled to the United States in 1941 and moved to Arizona in 1946 with the artist Dorothea Tanning. It was there that he created Coloradeau, inspired by the deserted landscape of the American West. While the title refers more to the neighbouring state of Colorado, Ernst’s main concern is a play on words between the colour of the landscapes, particularly their reddish coloured stones of Red Rock near Sedona where he lives, and The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, which he admires.

“Always go where the roads on maps stop, where there is nothing left.” (Bernard Plossu)

The great era of the road made cars its visible sign of modernity, a barrier-free path to a future that promised happiness and a way to detach oneself from everything, losing oneself voluntarily. The road is everywhere, yet no one lives there.

For On Kawara, this journey is a travelling workshop. His postcards sent from the distended places where he was, were his logbook. Martin Kippenberger, on the other hand, destabilises geography by using hotel stationery – never the same – during a journey that is more imaginary than real.

But these paths can also represent a world that no longer knows how to detach itself from the movement of machines. For Richard Baquié, an airliner becomes a strangely incomplete object at ground level, which only moves by the words it carries. Andy Warhol only looks to the rolling bodies of the automobile to note their terrible and deadly end; and once rid of its gasoline and interior, Caesar destroys them by reducing them to the only existence that their material can contain. Without a point of arrival, can the road still be an end in itself? 

The works of the Japanese artist On Kawara testify to his interest in the everyday passage of time, which became a recurring theme for him. Between 1968 and 1979 for the series I Got Up, Kawara sent postcards that simply indicated that he has woken up, and at what time. There are 1,500 of them. Through these postcards, the artist is also compiling an archive of his many journeys, given that each one indicates the place from where it was sent and the postmark confirming both its date and provenance.

This work is part of a series known as Death and Disaster, with which Andy Warhol launched his career in 1962, and is inspired by the image of a plane crash published on the front page of the New York Mirror newspaper. Setting aside for a moment images of Coca-Cola and Campbell’s soup that had made him famous, he took up the dramatic photographs he found in the press in a bid to cancel their macabre effect by repeatedly reproducing them across numerous copies.

Having obtained the drift, nose and cockpit of a caravel, Richard Baquié would go on to use the front part of this 1960-1970 airliner to produce The Cockpit. While taking up ideas akin to his first works made of assemblies, through this installation Baquié invites us to reflect on what our thoughts and dreams represent, combining a modern means of transport with the romantic, nocturnal, starry sky that neon lights symbolise.
 

Observing land, the traveller’s need to touch and manipulate it slowly becomes all-consuming. This is the idea from which that Land art is derived, and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty symbolises its abstraction, given that no boat will ever dock there and following it to its end, in fact, leads nowhere. As with prehistoric cave art, here is the mark of those who only passed through and have left.

Everywhere, humans appropriate geography. This is the case with lands and the sometimes fictitious boundaries of their contours. Rather than taking inspiration from them, Andreas Gursky photographs them with a technical coldness that aims for impossible perfection, as if to better highlight their lack of meaning. Mona Hatoum, on the other hand, weaves them into a carpet, bending them along neon tubes, underlining their belonging to the act that draws them. With a single look, everyone is called upon to remember the good or bad faith of those who hold these positions.

Located on the Great Salt Lake of Utah, Spiral Jetty is one of the most important works of Land art, a movement that began in the late 1960s. Built from local rocks, the spiral is over 450 metres long. The film, shot by Smithson and Nancy Holt, combines the construction of the work with elements of prehistory, geology, astronomy and mythology, disorienting the viewer while evoking what Smithson called “the history of the earth”.

Andreas Gursky’s photographs are often part of a critical vision of our era marked by globalisation and capitalism. Starting from the artificial islands produced in Dubai as sites for luxurious villas, Gursky offers here an image of unreal perfection, which no element can locate, with the large dimensions of the print still coming to contradict the documentary aspect of photography.

On a globe the meridians and parallels of which form a metallic cage, the contours of the continents drawn by an incandescent red neon light produce a disturbing cartography. Starting from a simple object supposed to teach the basics of geography, Mona Hatoum thus represents a world where conflicts are no longer only linked to borders, but rather extend to cover the entire planet. 

In their annual migration for sun and sea, mass tourism consumers and the artists who make them their models are far from Rimbaud’s eternity. And these artists mock in their own way, as does Duane Hanson, who adorns artificial characters with an exotic print, making holidaymakers become lifeless presences. Or Martin Parr, who notes the same attitude everywhere, that of travellers reacting in exactly the same way in Venice, Cuba or India.

The South Seas contain more than a postcard image can express. For Sigalit Landau, the Dead Sea and its history follow the turn of a life that begins again and again. For Camille Henrot, the Pacific is the one-way mirror where distant, animist traditions face the barely swallowed remains of human madness and the wrecks that our war has left on its foundations.

Martin Parr’s work, both an artist and a press photographer, has always focused on social life as it evolves in our time. For the series The Selfie Stick, the aim is more particularly a question of examining tourism and consumption through the practice of the selfie, this self-portrait produced by means of a cellphone in many tourist spots around the world. Beyond the postcard image, Parr questions the utility of photography by immortalising those who photograph themselves.
 

Exile is a great flow of the world’s movement. It represents the current of many human rivers that are trying to find new lands to settle in when those from where they originate have become too dry, whether in a bid to escape the aridity of a soil that no longer wants to feed, or that of spirits that no longer want to leave life to others. Born in Cameroon, Barthélémy Toguo knows these issues in the most immediate way possible.

But without ignoring the drama of leaving one’s place of origin, Road to exile refuses to sink into absolute pessimism. With its fabrics in very vivid colours, the simplicity of its boat and its journey over bottles into the sea, the installation also tells us that sometimes exile leads to a good port, and encourages us to reflect for a moment on a life where the impossibility of exile would be experienced as a confinement.  

Barthélémy Toguo’s installation consists of an improbably assembled wooden boat, carrying a pile of fabric over recovered bottles. Born in Cameroon, Toguo thus symbolically evokes the dangers of emigration into which many young people from Africa are embarking. But the work is not entirely dramatic, and its multicoloured, almost playful aspect reminds us that exile can also be the path to a better life.
 

Memories of a trip can be just as memorable as the trip itself. Thus, while his stay in Polynesia in 1930 did not seem to have given him much satisfaction, Henri Matisse returned to it in his mind more than 15 years later. Polynésie, la mer and Polynésie, le ciel, which stem from his distant memories, evoke the elements between which the Pacific islands are in balance, yet also the infinite spaces that are open to anyone who wants to embark on them.

Henri Matisse left Paris in 1930 for New York, crossed the United States by train and then from San Francisco sailed to Tahiti where he arrived on 29 March. With this journey, he wanted to renew his inspiration and search for new spaces and a different light.

All these Polynesian sensations would contribute to the emergence 18 years later of a new oeuvre, the exhibition of which focused on the late extension of its remanences. The result would be the creation of two turquoise blue and dark blue tapestries, where large white birds set to seaweed and corals and surrounded by an edge that evokes the lagoon, symbolise the poetry of the archipelago, thanks to the softening and fluidity of line, an ease of contour, and the decantation of shape.