Echoes Across the Palais de Tokyo

The Palais de Tokyo rises from the banks of the Seine like a monumental paradox. Its vast concrete body is both an arena and an accomplice: it doesn’t merely host art but amplifies it, bending light and echoing sound until the space itself becomes part of the work.

This summer, the Palais unfolded as a constellation of encounters. Six exhibitions occupying its labyrinthine halls are vibrating with their own rhythm yet resonating with the others. Moving through them feels less like visiting separate shows and more like passing through a single, evolving organism.

John Giorno: Welcoming the Flowers

The first thing greeting visitors in the foyer is a moment of calm in John Giorno’s Welcoming the Flowers. An exhibition conceived by Ugo Rondinone as a luminous homage to the late poet. Giorno’s text paintings are arranged like windows, illuminated by sunlight that filters through his words.

Each phrase, short, declarative and tender, functions as both poem and presence. Giorno’s work offers air and light, proof that language too can occupy space with quiet intensity.

Vivian Suter: Disco

The journey continues to unfold in color. Vivian Suter’s Disco stretches across the main space like a force of nature, an installation of nearly 500 unframed canvases suspended in air. The works, painted over two decades in her garden in Panajachel, Guatemala, are steeped in the life of their surroundings. Leaves, mud, and rain have seeped into the fabric, leaving behind stains and textures that speak of time and weather.

There is no front or back, no clear path through this pictorial jungle. Visitors weave between the swaying fabrics as light shines down from the newly opened glass roof above. The paintings seem to breathe and spark to life, animated by the faint movement of air. What begins as chaos gradually reveals rhythm: abstraction gives way to a kind of natural order. Suter’s decision to let her works face the elements, and expose them rather than protect them, has transformed painting into an act of coexistence.

The title, Disco, named after one of her dogs, adds a note of levity, but beneath this seeming playfulness lies an artist who has learned to surrender control and let the world and force of nature collaborate in the making of her work.

Thao Nguyen Phan: Le soleil tombe sans un bruit

While Suter’s world bursts outward, Thao Thao Nguyen Phan’s The Sun Falls Silently turns inward. The exhibition unfolds in muted tones and slow-moving images, an environment that feels suspended between dream and remembrance. Thao Nguyen Phan’s first monograph in France brings together paintings, videos and sculptures that trace the layered relationship between Vietnam and France. It´s a dialogue of shared histories, silences and echoes.

Her works inhabit the border between fiction and documentation, a reinterpretation of historical amnesia and official memories. The influence of Diem Phung Thi, a Vietnamese modernist sculptor who lived and worked in France, runs through the exhibition like a quiet current. Her modular geometric forms become metaphors for resilience and continuity.

Thao Nguyen Phan’s approach is one of careful balance: her art murmurs, revealing history’s spectral presence through texture and rhythm. In the hush of her rooms, time folds in on itself, and memory takes physical form.

Chalisée Naamani: Octogone

From this atmosphere of meditation, the transition into Chalisée Naamani’s Octogone feels like stepping into a pulse. The Franco-Iranian artist reimagines her exhibition space as a hybrid arena, a place where body, image and identity collide.

Naamani’s “image dresses”, constructed from digital collages, photographs and textiles, hang and twist like flags, or garments of a new mythology. The octagonal geometry of the installation recalls the traditional Iranian zurkhaneh, a gymnasium of physical and spiritual training. Within this structure, Naamani explores the body as a site of resilience and transformation, merging personal history with collective struggle.

Fragments of her family’s story interlace with images gathered from the internet, forming a composite of cultural and emotional heritage. Octogone becomes a choreography of resistance, where bodies and images train themselves to endure and to reinvent.

RAMMELLZEE: ALPHABETA SIGMA (Face A)

Where Naamani’s arena pulses, RAMMELLZEE’s letters explode. His exhibition, ALPHABETA SIGMA (Face A), transforms the Palais de Tokyo into a cathedral of explosive energy.

RAMMELLZEE was a legend of New York’s early 1980s underground and treated language as a battlefield. His “Gothic Futurism” reimagined letters as warriors, each armed with its own armor and mythology. In this first major European retrospective more than a hundred works reveal the full scope of his universe: resin-encrusted sculptures, graffiti-infused paintings, dense writings and relic-like objects that blur the boundary between art and artifact.

There is both humor and holiness in this chaos. RAMMELLZEE’s creations draw from medieval illumination, hip-hop rebellion and sci-fi prophecy. They speak in tongues that cannot be decoded easily. Light fractures through resin, bouncing off the walls like signals from another realm. What emerges is a vision of art as language liberated. It´s wild, defiant, and endlessly self-inventing.

Elia David: Chambre des échos

The visit concludes on a surprising, tender note in La Chambre des échos, where artist Elia David celebrates the canine muse. Her portraits of dogs are painted with both irony and affection and mirror the spirit of Suter’s Disco and its namesake. Here, art becomes an act of devotion and play, a gentle reminder that creativity also thrives in companionship and the small rituals of care.

Taken together, these exhibitions form a conversation about transformation of matter, language and identity. Each artist approaches the act of making as an opening rather than a statement: Suter’s surrender to nature, Thao Nguyen Phan’s dialogue with past and history, Naamani’s reconstruction of the body, Giorno’s illuminated words, RAMMELLZEE’s linguistic rebellion, and David’s tender portraits all share an impulse to connect life and art in motion.

The Palais de Tokyo itself becomes the unifying force. Its vast, breathing structure absorbs these contradictions and turns them into rhythm. By the time one steps back into the Paris light, the line between the building and its art has blurred. What remains is the feeling of having walked through something alive.