The exhibition City Prince/sses is presented as an imaginary, multiple and complex city, without borders, messy, staggering and creative: an unpredictable laboratory, which is always in motion and being (re)constructed. Visual artists, creators, fashion designers, experimenters, tattooists, musicians: a good fifty artists are presented without any geographical grouping, mostly via new productions and in situ interventions.

DHAKA, LAGOS, MANILA, MEXICO CITY and TEHRAN are expressions of a tissue of contradictions, as seen in their saturated traffic which coexists with digital networks which supposedly work fluidly. Quite clearly, these megacities are very different from one another. Their cultural, political and social singularities teem with numerous narratives which are all side-tracks providing glimpses into their identities, devoid of anything that could be univocal.

Between skyscrapers and shacks, urgency and patience, megacities are undergoing a chaotic expansion, mingling transfers of capital with technological connexions in financial centres, generating urban margins with numerous inequalities. This vast, disorderly movement transforms cities into ceaseless work sites, favouring imaginary deviations. The artists which then emerge are thus the flâneurs of the 21st century, the hackers of our responses to an urban environment which is often functional and standardized.

Raw and head-spinning hangings, mysterious landscapes, luminous or opaque zones, backrooms and traps: the presentation of the show has been conceptualised by the architect Olivier Goethals, according to the rhythms of day and night, from profusion to desaturation, alternating between monographic zones and terrains for encounters. He has elaborated an architectural pathway which reveals and accentuates the lines of force in the building, which is here being envisaged as an immense common area.

Curator: Hugo Vitrani
Associate curator: Fabien Danesi
Scenographer: Olivier Goethals

Dina Gadia (b.1986, Pangasinan, Philippines; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) adopted a Philippine pop iconography, derived as much from comics as the paintings on Jeepneys, those vehicles left behind by the American army after World War Two and which have now been transformed into public transport. Far from being identity- bearing or authoritarian signs, the banners made by the artist convey an abstract poetry based on the decontextualization of images. They subvert the familiar while tinging it with a form of absurdity.

For this exhibition, she will extend her project All States No States (2018 – 2019), with the production of eight new banners made in collaboration with local craftspeople.

Pow Martinez (1983; lives and works in Manila, Philippines) has been working on creations that combine painting, sculpture and installation. His drawings, mixing references to pop imagery and bad painting, reveal in their eclectic compositions a humoristic vision of Philippine history.

For this exhibition, he has been invited to produce a huge mural presenting a synthesis of several of his canvases with grotesque figures.