Nuit Blanche 2026 - “Une brise d’amour dans la nuit a passé”

Nuit Blanche 2026 - “Une brise d’amour dans la nuit a passé” (A passing breeze of love in the night).

Only the Auditorium is open to the public, and the “Calder. Rêver en équilibre” exhibition will be closed to visitors.
Admission is free, subject to availability.

This theme weaves together a programme of selected video pieces and poetry from the Foundation Collection, and includes five guest performance poets reciting words of love. For one evening only, the Foundation Auditorium will become a sharing and interaction space in which the power of words merges with the power of images.

This conjunction of art forms offers the opportunity to see and hear a diversity of voices evoking the linguistic and visual richness of love, from impulses and relationships to break-ups, doubts and desires: deeply human emotions to be experienced together in unison. As Barbara Butch reminds us, by putting love at the heart of collective experience as its driving force, its message and a precious possession to be shared, this event celebrates a universal language we all know and understand.

Programme

VALIE EXPORT

Breath Text: Love Poem

Produced between 1970 and 1973, Breath Text: Love Poem is a perfect example of this approach. Facing the camera, VALIE EXPORT repeatedly breathes on a piece of glass until the surface becomes misted over and the phrase Ich liebe dich (‘I love you’) gradually appears. Here, language is no longer a mere verbal utterance, but a physical inscription produced by breath, respiration and the body’s proximity to the screen. The declaration of love becomes a physical act, almost compulsive, where intimacy mingles with a sense of tension and breathlessness. By transforming breath into writing, the artist explores desire, presence, the distance from the viewer, and the very materiality of language.

Tao Hui

The Dusk of Tehran

Filmed during a residency in Tehran in 2014, the video The Dusk of Tehran is inspired by the words of the famous Hong Kong singer Anita Mui. Seated in the back of a taxi, smoking, a young local actress in a wedding dress converses with the driver, who remains off-screen, repeating the star’s words in Persian. Transposed geographically, these remarks on social ambition, the desire for love and the difficulty of finding it become an implicit critique of the constraints faced by women in Iran.

Tao Hui, "The Dusk of Teheran", 2014

HD, couleur et son iranien - sous titré français et anglais Durée : 4 min. 14 s.

Valérie Mréjen

Capri (2008)

Capri (2008) follows a couple on the brink of breaking up through dialogue drawn from the conventions of romantic fiction. By re-enacting these clichéd lines, the work explores the banality of the language of love and its ability, despite its conventional nature, to express an emotional truth.

Valérie Mréjen

Leur histoire (2014)

Leur histoire (2014) depicts a couple conversing in a restaurant, interspersed with images of postcards. The work explores the uncertainty of a love story, caught between memory and projection, allowing multiple interpretations of the same relationship to coexist. Through this disconnect between words and images, Valérie Mréjen examines the fragility of language and the difficulty of constructing a shared history.

Youssef Nabil

You Never Left (2010)

You Never Left (2010) is a poetic short film starring Fanny Ardant and Tahar Rahim, designed as an allegory of exile and memory. Set in a symbolic otherworld reminiscent of a lost Egypt, the film explores nostalgia, absence and the impossible desire to return, through imagery inspired by the golden age of Egyptian cinema. It thus expands upon the artist’s central themes, where personal memory, uprooting and cinematic imagination intertwine in a reflection on identity and belonging.

Anri Sala

Answer Me (2008)

Answer Me (2008) portrays impossible romantic communication: in a former NSA listening dome in West Berlin, a woman tries to reach a man whose voice is drowned out by the sound of his drumming. By transforming an intimate scene into a sound experience, the work explores the impossibility of dialogue, emotional distance and the way in which space can give tangible form to an emotional conflict.

Ming Wong

Apprendre l’allemand avec Petra von Kant (2007)

A signature piece of his practice, Learning German with Petra von Kant (2007) shows the artist recreating a scene from Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, in which Petra, abandoned by Karin, sinks into the despair of unrequited love. Dressed as Margit Carstensen, he adopts the gestures, words and identity of a female character to explore issues of role, gender, identification and cultural displacement, blending personal experience with cinematic references.

With videos by: Valie Export, Tao Hui, Valérie Mréjen, Youssef Nabil, Anri Sala, Ming Wong.

With interventions by: Selim-a Atallah Chettaoui, Rim Battal, Karim Kattan, Nantene Traore.

A programme designed by Ludovic Delalande (Fondation Louis Vuitton).

Les artistes

Anri Sala (1974, Albanie) crée des œuvres dont la temporalité ne cesse de générer des transformations à partir des relations multiples entre l’image, l’architecture et le son qu’il emploie comme des éléments pour pouvoir plier, renverser et remettre en question nos expériences. Son travail provoque des ruptures dans le langage, dans la musique, dans l’espace et dans le temps, suscitant des dislocations créatives qui génèrent de nouvelles interprétations de l’histoire et supplantent les anciennes fictions et narrations par des dialogues moins explicites, plus nuancés.

Tracing a distinctly unconventional path between art, literature and cinema, Valérie Mréjen has emerged as one of the most singular figures on the contemporary art scene today. She is an associate artist at the Théâtre National de Bretagne in Rennes. Her first monograph was published in 2021 by Éditions Manuella.

Born in 1969 in Paris, she lives and works in Paris.

VALIE EXPORT lived and worked in Vienna. A pioneer in conceptual photography, video and performance art, she has produced one of the most significant bodies of feminist art since the 1960s. In 1967, she adopted the name VALIE EXPORT, a bold reinvention that marked the beginning of her new artistic identity. In 1968, she co-founded the Austrian Filmmakers Cooperative. She has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including documenta 6 and 12 (1977 and 2007) and the Austrian Pavilion at the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980.

In recent years, her work has been exhibited at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at Schindler House, Los Angeles (2024); C/O Berlin Foundation (2024); Albertina, Vienna (2023); Fotomuseum Winterthur (2023); Kunsthaus Bregenz (2023); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2020); Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier (2019); Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017); Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2010); Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2009); and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007). EXPORT has taught at a number of international institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, San Francisco Art Institute and University of the Arts in Berlin.

From 1995–2005 she was professor of multimedia and performance at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. In 2019, she was awarded the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the visual arts. EXPORT received the Max-Beckmann-Prize of the City of Frankfurt 2022. With the purchase of her premature legacy, the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz was founded in 2015, laying the foundations for an international research centre for media and performance art. In 2023, the artist established the VALIE EXPORT FOUNDATION in Vienna, a non-profit that aims to preserve and research the artist’s work. Learn more at valieexport.at.

Né en 1972 au Caire (Égypte), Youssef Nabil vit et travaille à Paris (France) et à New York (États-Unis).
Youssef Nabil puise son inspiration dans le concept de la mémoire et l'univers cinématographique qu'il a grandi en admirant depuis l'Égypte. L'esthétique éthérée de ses œuvres provient de la technique photographique de coloration des films en technicolor. L'artiste peint à la main chacune de ses photographies en noir et blanc, les éditions devenant des variations, chacune une version unique du labeur de l'artiste.

Youssef Nabil bénéficie de nombreuses expositions dans les institutions et biennales de renommée internationale, aux États-Unis, au Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) à Miami, au Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), au Studio Museum in Harlem et à Aperture Foundation à New York, au Smithsonian National Museum of African Art et au Kennedy Center à Washington, D.C., le Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) à Savannah et à Atlanta, et le North Carolina Museum of Art à Raleigh ; au Canada, au Aga Khan Museum of Art à Toronto ; en France, au Centre Pompidou, à la Maison Rouge - Fondation Antoine de Galbert, à l'Institut du Monde Arabe et à la Maison Européenne de la Photographie à Paris, au Frac Normandie à Sotteville- lès-Rouen, à la Friche Belle de Mai à Marseille, aux Rencontres de la Photographie à Arles, ; en Belgique, à la Fondation Boghossian et à la Maison Particulière à Bruxelles ; au Royaume-Uni, au British Museum et au Victoria & Albert Museum à Londres, et au BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art à Newcastle ; en Allemagne, au Museum für Modern Kunst (MMK) de Francfort, au Kunstmuseum de Bonn et à la Gemäldegalerie Staatliche Museen de Berlin ; en Espagne, au Musée d'art contemporain (MACBA) de Barcelone, au Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo de Séville et à l'Instituto d'Art Modern de Valence (IVAM) ; en Italie, à la Villa Médicis à Rome, à la Galleria dell'Accademia à Florence, au Palazzo Grassi à Venise et à la 53e Biennale de Venise, Unconditional Love ; au Qatar, au Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art à Doha ; au Mexique, au Centro de la Imagen à Mexico ; et au Mali, aux 5èmes Rencontres de la Photographie africaine à Bamako, au cours desquelles il a reçu le prix Seydou Keïta. En 2020/2021, Youssef Nabil a eu sa première exposition rétrospective au Palazzo Grassi de Venise, intitulée Once Upon A Dream. En 2026, il est le premier photographe invité à exposer au Musée d’Orsay à Paris.

Les œuvres de Youssef Nabil figurent dans de prestigieuses collections internationales parmi lesquelles : aux États-Unis, le Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), le Pérez Art Museum à Miami (PAMM), le Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, et le Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (SCAD) à Savannah ; en France, la Fondation Louis Vuitton, la Collection François Pinault, et la Maison Européenne de la Photographie à Paris ; en Suisse, la Collection UBS Art à Zürich ; au Royaume-Uni, le British Museum et le Victoria & Albert Museum à Londres ; en Angola, la Fondation Sindika Dokolo à Luanda ; en Grèce, le Musée de la photographie à Thessalonique ; au Qatar, le Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art à Doha ; aux Émirats arabes unis, le Musée Guggenheim à Abu Dhabi ; au Mexique, le Centro de la Imagen à Mexico.

Quatre monographies ont été publiées sur l'œuvre de Youssef Nabil : Sleep in My Arms (Autograph ABP et Michael Stevenson, 2007), I Won't Let You Die (Hatje Cantz, 2008), Youssef Nabil (Flammarion, 2013) et Once Upon A Dream (Marsilio, 2020).

Tao Hui graduated in painting from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and now focuses on new media.

His videos and installations combine realism and fantasy in stories about different times and places, drawing on China’s traditional culture as well as its television dramas.

Through multidisciplinary work—video, performances, installations—Ming Wong revisits the classics of world cinema: Pasolini, Visconti, Bergman, Wong Kar-wai, Fassbinder, etc..

By a meticulous process of reconstructing and skewing, which pokes fun at the reminiscings of collective memory, the artist reenacts scenes from legendary films by recomposing his own, mirror image of it. Male or female, he performs all roles, rarely calling on other performers. Through these fictional characters, he explores notions of representation and gender, culture and identity, but also of language.

Les POETE.SS.ES

Selim-a Atallah Chettaoui is a poet and performer who grew up in Tunisia. Their work thrives in the in-between, merging languages and media to explore fresh ways of bringing poetry to life and making connections between joy and violence, identity and socio-political issues. They are part of the ecopoetry collective fœhn and the decolonial feminist artistic platform Xeno~. Selim-a released their debut poetry collection, Des odeurs de bretzels de barbecue et de weed, with 10 pages au carré in 2022, and their follow-up Au Pieu has been published by La Contre-allée in 2025.

They also co-edited the anthology Poèmes à l’usage d’un monde en flammes, published by Le Castor Astral in 2026.

Passionate about performance, they showcase their work in Museums, during Literary festival and at electro concerts. They have released two songs with the musician Arthur Ely and are currently working on their first EP which will be out in 2026. Their performances have been shown in a.o. Musée du Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Gaîté Lyrique…

Laureate of the Villa Swagatam program, they were a resident at Lakmahal Community Library in Sri Lanka in winter 2026 and will be a resident of La Maison Julien Gracq in the spring.

Selim-a Atallah Chettaoui is a poet, performer and researcher. They grew up in Tunis and have been living in Paris for the last 10 years. After studying clinical psychology, and French and English literature, they obtained an MFA in creative writing and held a teaching position in literature and creative writing for three years at CY Cergy Paris University. For their MFA, their final project was a heterolingual digital autofiction taking the form of the hypertextual website https://binnelbinin.art/ .

Their art practice explores the in-between, and what lays unseen under our social habits, beliefs and perceptions. It seeks to create links between multiple art forms and to invite a new public to poetry events, notably through their work with DJs, musicians and visual artists. This has led them to use diverse mediums in their performances such as text, music, video, body art and collage.
They were laureate of the Labo_demo 2022 of the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles for emerging performance writings and won the musical springboard Campus Sounds in 2023. That led them to become a supported artist of Le Douze Cergy and Le Forum de Vauréal for the musical-video project Mooja, in collaboration with the French DJ duo Housecall and Tunisian-Luxembourg visual artist Zohra Mrad. That support started during the 2023-2024 season and will be prolonged during the 2024-2025 season.
Their performances were given in diverse art and literary venues in France (Centre Pompidou, Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Maison de La Poésie, Points Communs Scène nationale, Le Générateur, Maison Folie-Moulins, La Bellevilloise Gaîté Lyrique, Point Ephémère, La Villa Valmont, Le Sample, Maison de la Tunisie, Fondation Biermans-Lapôtre, Université de Cergy, Sciences Po Paris, IUT de Bobigy, Librairies Le Genre Urbain, Le Divan, La Belle Lurette, Zeugma…) Belgium (beursschouwbeurg, Halles de Schaerbeek for the Poetik Bazar…) and in Tunisia (Institut Français de Tunis, Al Kitab Librairie, Be Actor Studio…).

In these institutions, and as a teacher at CY Cergy Paris University they gave multiple workshops to various age groups (ranging from age 6 to adults) centering around writing, voice directing and mixed-media practices. That led the participants to create hypertextual websites, sound poems, collages, video-poems and short performances. Selim-a was also part of conferences, talks and workshops around the works of Gisèle Halimi, the notions of passing, resistance, and language.
Their texts were published in various literary magazines (Papier Machine, Recours au Poème, Point de Chute, Deuxième Page, Contre5ens, Manhattan Magazine…) and their first book, Des odeurs de bretzels, de barbecue et de weed was published in 2022 by 10 pages au carré. Their second book will be published in 2025 by les Éditions de La Contre-allée.
They are part of multiple groups of the very dynamic parisian poetry scene such as Le Bordel de la poésie, Poétesses gang, Mauvaises Langues… and were one of the curators and organizers of the [cargo] events during the year 2023. They are also one of the founders along with Zohra Mrad, Dorsène and Florian Bardou of the new intermedial collective Fœhn, focused on ecopoetry through an intersectional gaze. Their first literary magazine will be published in June along with two days of events, co-curated by them at les Arches Citoyennes. They are also part of the belgian based artistic platform xeno_.

Named by French culture magazine Les Inrocks as one of the ten next-generation poets to follow on social media, Rim Battal has been described by Vogue as “one of the most powerful voices in young Francophone poetry.” After studying journalism, she now dedicates herself to writing, blending poetry, prose and visual arts in her performances in France and abroad, including the DRC, Switzerland and Germany.
Published in paperback by Castor Astral in 2022, her first personal anthology Mine de rien offers “a contemporary and liberated vision" (Ouest-France). After eight poetry collections, Rim Battal’s first novel Je me regarderai dans les yeux was published (Bayard éditions) in January 2025.

Après des études de journalisme, elle se consacre à l’écriture créative et mêle poésie, corps et arts visuels dans les performances qu’elle donne en France et à l’international (RDC, Suisse, Allemagne, etc.). Sa voix singulière questionne les normes et défend une parole féminine affranchie, à la fois intime et universelle. En 2022 paraît sa première anthologie personnelle en poche au Castor Astral : Mine de rien offre « un regard contemporain et affranchi » (Ouest-France). Après huit ouvrages poétiques, Rim Battal publie, en janvier 2025, son premier roman intitulé Je me regarderai dans les yeux, chez Bayard éditions.

Karim Kattan is a Palestinian writer who grew up in Bethlehem. He writes his fiction, essays and poetry in both English and French. His publications include the novel Eden at Dawn (2024) and his first poetry collection Hortus Conclusus (2025). His third novel Septentrionale is due for publication in autumn 2026.
His French language pieces have appeared in publications as diverse as Le Monde, Libération, Mediapart and AOC, in literary and poetry reviews, including the iconic Canadian francophone science-fiction and fantasy magazine and Kometa, as well as edited publications, including most recently the Poèmes à l'usage d'un monde en flammes collection published by (Castor Astral, 2026).

His English writing has been published in a number of magazines, including The Paris Review, The Dial, The European Review of Books, The Baffler, Strange Horizons and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

His work has also been showcased in many art spaces, including the Venice Biennale, the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, the São Paulo Architecture Biennale, the VIMA Art Fair in Limassol, Bétonsalon in Paris, the MMAG Foundation in Amman, the Kaaitheater in Brussels, B7L9 in Tunis, Mophradat in Athens, the Frac des Pays de la Loire, the Berlinale Forum in Berlin, the Centre rhénan d'art contemporain in Altkirch, the Galerie du Jour agnès b. and Galerie Imane Farès in Paris, and many others.

Nanténé Traoré (b. 1993) is an author and visual artist. Having graduated in visual arts from the École des Beaux-Arts Nantes Saint-Nazaire (France), they moved to Brussels, where they now live and work. Represented by the Sultana gallery in Paris, their poetry, drama and essays are published by Gorge Bleue, Les Insolentes and Points respectively. Their first novel Andromaque dans une Berline rouge will be published by L'Arbre de Diane (Belgium) in October 2026.

Nanténé Traoré tells stories with both words and images. Borrowing from the storyteller's role as scribe to recount both what has been and what is yet to come, they seek simultaneously to document the present and create a new iconography of intimacy. Their photographs and texts tell stories of tenderness, impartation and freedom, often narrated through fluid, non-normative bodies in movement.

Through apparently infinite repetition of images, movements and words, their most recent pieces address the need to overcome the head-spinning immensity what is missing from our world.

Nuit Blanche 2026 - “Une brise d’amour dans la nuit a passé”