An evening invitation to experience museums in unexpected ways, À vos marques, prêts? Musées! presents a programme that reimagines collection display and public encounter. Visitors encounter painting, sculpture, installation, photography and time-based media alongside talks, performances and guided perspectives that foreground hidden narratives and curatorial experimentation.
Leila Alaoui’s photography presents a humane, boundary-crossing vision that interrogates identity, migration and the lives of migrant workers. This exhibition brings together iconic series, rarely seen photographs and coherent photographic ensembles to reveal the dignity of her subjects and the visual language that frames their stories. Through portraiture and documentary practice, Alaoui explores gender, displacement and cultural interconnection with formal rigor and emotional clarity, forging intimate encounters that bridge histories and territories.
Opening: Wednesday 6 May, 18:30
Yvan Salomone presents a series of recent watercolours that transform anonymous buildings and soulless industrial sites into evocative landscapes. Through delicate, velvety tones, subtle colour modulations and watery traces that suggest life, the artist elevates banal subjects and transfigures objective reality. The exhibition’s title, 2611, alludes to Salomone’s practice of assigning eleven‑letter titles composed from the alphabet, producing names that detach the work from literal description and invite poetic reading.
Opening: Thursday 7 May , 16:00
The exhibition “Sauvages” at the Cité Library invites visitors to delve into the behind-the-scenes of Claude Barras’s film. It is divided into three sections that cover the ecological and cultural aspects of Borneo, reveal the creative and production processes of the film, and immerse the audience in the filming atmosphere through never-before-seen photos and testimonials. Original documents, drawings, travel journals, sets, and figurines enhance this immersive experience.
Dream Up brings together modern, post‑war and contemporary works that materialize imagination, memory, fantasy and inner vision across painting, sculpture and mixed media. The presentation juxtaposes iconic figures—Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Roy Lichtenstein, Yayoi Kusama, Niki de Saint Phalle, Tom Wesselmann, Manolo Valdés and Jaume Plensa—with contemporary voices including Andy Denzler, Fred Eerdekens and Feng Xiao‑Min. New works created for the occasion converse with historical pieces to generate poetic, visually intense dialogues.
The Tender Buttons exhibition offers a multidisciplinary exploration centered on buttons, delving into their identity and historical significance. Featuring over three hundred ceramic and glass buttons, the exhibition interacts with the museum’s works to highlight their role in both formal experimentation and socio-cultural narratives. The exhibition’s architecture evokes the commercial arcades of the 19th century, a pivotal era for button industrialization. Curated by Claire FitzGerald, the exhibition is supported by the Swiss Fashion Museum and showcases never-before-seen pieces from several prestigious collections.
MABE Gallery presents Forza Silenziosa, the second solo exhibition of Sofia Cacciapaglia, whose paintings evoke a quiet, fluid world where forms, bodies, and landscapes gently merge, expressing a soft yet powerful feminine presence rooted in emotion, connection, and subtle energy.
Her work emphasizes transformation, intimacy, and dreamlike atmospheres, where silence carries intensity. Using reclaimed cardboard from her Milan neighborhood, she connects to the ethos of Arte Povera—a movement theorized by Germano Celant and associated with artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis—by embracing ‘poor’ materials and their histories; however, she diverges through her distinctly figurative and painterly approach, transforming humble surfaces into poetic images that bridge material awareness with narrative, imagination, and contemporary femininity.
Opening: Thursday 7 May, 16:00 – 21:00
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