Barbara Kruger Traces ‘The History of Tears’ in New Bourse de Commerce Installation
The massive artwork floods the famed rotunda with warnings of complicity and control.
Summary
Artist Barbara Kruger unveils a new installation, 'The History of Tears,' within the Bourse de Commerce's rotunda in Paris
The artwork immerses viewers in Kruger's bold messages, spanning the concrete architecture and light boxes lining the space
Her work "Untitled (Remember Me)" (1988/2020) also inspired the title for another ongoing exhibition which explores the 200-year history of photography
Barbara Kruger makes her mark on Paris’ Bourse de Commerce this season, taking over its star rotunda with a major installation.
Called The History of Tears, the presentation floods the Tadao Ando-designed architecture with a blast of bold black, white, and red. The title comes from “Who Will Write the History of Tears?”, a phrase that runs through her work, and the exhibition is no less provocative.
Visitors are immersed, nearly suffocated in a stream of words, phrases, and messages circling issues of alienation, violence, power, and sexuality. Walls are blasted with quotes from the likes of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming, two texts bound by their warnings of oppression’s destructive impact.
The 24 display cases in the passage have been transformed into light boxes — “MORALIZE IT” reads one, “KISS IT” reads another — flooding the space with striking messages by the artist, with two video works, including “Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust” (1996), also mounted nearby.
Courtesy Of The Artists / Sprüth Magers / Pinault Collection
Courtesy Of The Artists / Sprüth Magers / Pinault Collection
Courtesy Of The Artists / Sprüth Magers / Pinault Collection
Courtesy Of The Artists / Sprüth Magers / Pinault Collection
“An ongoing deluge of the eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust. This reservoir can accumulate through domination and conquest, both worldly and domestically. It spurts in moments of global violence and brutality but also amidst the cruelties of intimacy,” Kruger wrote on the installation. “It can show and tell us how we were, how we are and how we will be to one another”.
A 1988/2020 work also serves as the inspiration for Remember Me, another exhibition on view, celebrating 200 years of photography. Like the rotunda installation, the show is curated by the Pinault Collection’s photography advisor, Mattieu Humery. Journeying between eras and genres, the exhibition traces the medium’s rich history and diverse perspectives through over 700 works by over 70 artists, with Annie Leibovitz, Peter Hujar, Nan Goldin, Man Ray, Lee Miller, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Danh Võ, among them.
The History of Tears and Remember Me are both on view in Paris from October 7 until January 18, 2027.
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
2 Rue de Viarmes,
75001 Paris, France
