Le droit des objets à (se) disposer d’eux-mêmes: a journey through the CNAP design collection

The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy and Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP) together invite the artist Pierre Giner to propose a new type of exhibition. Le droit des objets à (se) disposer d’eux-mêmes introduces objects from the CNAP design collection into the museum’s galleries. Other works are presented in dematerialised form using the CNAP^N digital tool which generates virtual exhibitions from the 8,000 design objects in the CNAP database.

This exhibition concludes a three-part collaboration between CNAP and the museum that began in 2015 with Zone de confort, an introduction to design through the notion of comfort, and continued in 2017 with Le grand détournement, which considered the designer at work, and the creative and production process. Jointly curated, both were shown at Galerie Poirel in Nancy. This third exhibition is held at the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts and questions the principle of a collection.

A part-real, part-virtual design exhibition

Artist, exhibition designer and curator Pierre Giner works with technologies such as video, mobile, digital and video games. In 2010 he was commissioned by CNAP to design CNAP^N: a vast search engine that sheds a different light on what a “collection” is or can be.

For the exhibition in Nancy, Giner explores new potentialities for this tool by having various “inserts” infiltrate the museum’s permanent collections. They form detours in visitors’ usual circulation through the galleries, inviting them to think more about the uses and typologies of the CNAP collection and compare them with those of the museum.

As a counterpoint to the dematerialised content of CNAP^N, CNAP has loaned works by the following contemporary artists and designers: Bless, Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec, Stéphane Calais, Pierre Charpin, Anne James Chaton, Lucas Dhalén, Florence Doléac, Laureline Galliot, Rody Graumans, Marie-Ange Guilleminot, Constance Guisset, Enzo Mari, Jasper Morrison, Olivier Vadrot.