To breathe
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris
March 20 – September 02, 2024

As part of the “Le monde comme il va” exhibition, South Korean artist Kimsooja is presenting a carte blanche entitled “To Breathe – Constellation”. Her installation in the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce is both monumental and ethereal: an immense mirror on the floor that, as one approaches, inverts the architecture and the order of the world with it, the sky opening up in the middle of the building, beneath our feet. Kimsooja is also taking over the 24 display cases in the Passage and the lower level of the museum with works and video installations that address her favourite themes: identity, borders, memory, exile, movement, and weaving. “I would like to create works that are like water and air, which we cannot possess but which can be shared with everyone”, Kimsooja says.

The mirror that she has used to cover the floor of the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce plays a similar role to that of the needle or of her own body. “The mirror replaces the body, observing and reflecting the other” “By using it, our gaze acts like a sewing thread that moves to and fro, entering into the depths of our self and of the other, reconnecting us to their reality and inner world. A mirror is a fabric woven by own gaze in an ebbing and flowing motion”. Kimsooja transfigures the architecture into a dizzying, levitating space, an inversion of the world in which the sky in the glass dome becomes a deep abyss, thereby altering our perception of the space and our sense of the gravitation of bodies. She hollows out the architecture and leaves an empty space to generate new sensations and perhaps also the sense that our body acts like the one in Needle Woman: an axis that binds the sky to the earth. In resonance with the thinking of Tadao Ando and his quest for an architecture of the empty and the infinite, Kimsooja has covered the floor of the Rotunda with a mirror.

She thereby transforms an artwork into something more than just an object, an installation, or an image; it instead becomes an essential experience. Between appearance and disappearance, contemplation and astonishment, light-headness and amazement, the thus-transfigured empty space is no longer, in the words of François Cheng, “an inert presence; it is filled with breaths that connect the world we can see to the one we cannot“. The mirror that Kimsooja offers us also moulds the space into a gathering, the possibility of a totality that invites us all to create a world together.

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