The History of Tears

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

Specifically designed for the museum's Rotunda and display cases, Barbara Kruger's exhibition "The History of Tears" confronts visitors with an uninterrupted flow of words, phrases, injunctions, filmed sequences, and voices.

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

Two videos are intertwined with this ensemble, reinstalled today in this new setup.

Produced and edited by the artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus (USA), 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 where desire, domination, fear, and violence intermingle.

Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Barbara Kruger composes a total work where the intimate and the political, the body and language, collide in a hypnotic whirlwind whose impact resonates today with striking acuity. “An infinite 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, globally and domestically.

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

It is a bodily production, both memorised and