L’Arrière-pays II

Conceived at the invitation of Le Carré de Baudouin, the Centre national des arts plastiques presents the exhibition L’Arrière-pays II, from April 14 to May 16, 2026.

Borrowing its title from the poet Yves Bonnefoy, the exhibition seeks to shed light on and reframe our present, tracing lines of force that are also gestures of emancipation.

Flight, wandering, passages, exile, migration, crossings, abandonment, borders: many contemporary works explore these experiences of displacement. Through video, artists find points of passage, invent alternative temporalities, and rethink geographies, despite disorientation, estrangement from oneself and one’s community, and the turbulence of political time. By collecting archives and testimonies in the form of narratives, they in turn become witnesses—watchful sentinels—restoring a voice to those deprived of the possibility of saying “I,” in search of a hinterland.

In the work of the poet Yves Bonnefoy, L’Arrière-pays refers to a dual spatial and temporal exile, a questioning of the present, and a search for another place of memory, of History, and of the invisible in all its dimensions.

Conceived as a journey through cycles of disparate narratives, the works brought together in this exhibition address transmission (Marwa Arsanios, Lamine Ammar Khodja, Sirine Fattouh, Bouchra Khalili, Elika Hedayat, Dania Reymond), political geographies (Elisabeth Leuvrey, Randa Maddah), buried histories (Ghassan Halwani, Safia Benhaïm), memory, and political fictions (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Narimane Mari, Larissa Sansour).

All of these works are rooted in geopolitical spaces marked by war or chronic instability.

This exhibition constitutes the second chapter of a travelling exhibition that has taken on multiple variations across different contexts, venues, and institutional geographies since 2021.