‘for life is not a spectacle’ barbara kruger wraps tadao ando’s rotunda in monumental texts

The History of Tears at the Bourse de Commerce iN Paris

American artist Barbara Kruger fills Tadao Ando’s rotunda at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris with a monumental work of text and image. Made for the curved concrete walls at the museum’s core, The History of Tears is the opening installation of Remember Me, the Pinault Collection’s exhibition marking two hundred years of photography. Kruger’s words run across the walls, continue under visitors’ feet over the full width of the floor, and carry on into twenty four display cases in the surrounding Passage, which have been turned into lightboxes carrying her own commands.

At the center of the rotunda, in the artist’s signature black, white and red, is a quote from the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming (1947). ‘And above all, my body as well as my soul, beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for a life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium, a man screaming is not a dancing bear.’ Césaire addressed those words to his own body and soul, and Kruger has left them as they are while changing who is standing in front of them. They now face a museum audience that has paid to come and look.

On view from October 7, 2026, the exhibition around the installation has borrowed its name from Kruger as well. Remember Me, curated by Matthieu Humery with Lola Regard, takes its title from Untitled (Remember me), a 1988 work she rebuilt in 2020 as an LED panel. Some 700 photographs by more than 80 artists follow it through the building.

BARBARA KRUGER’S INTERVENTION INSIDE THE ROTUNDA

Tadao Ando’s intervention at the Bourse de Commerce is a single concrete cylinder, thirty meters across and nine meters high, set inside the old grain exchange without touching its walls. Barbara Kruger has used the inner face as a page, and two enormous white ellipses now sit on it, one in French and one in English, each headed by a single word in red, TOI and YOU, with italic condensed lines bending along the curve.

The French ellipse ends ‘jusqu’à ce que toi, l’observateur, tu disparaisses. plus rien. toi aussi.’, or ‘until you, the observer, disappear, nothing more, you too.’ The English one ends with the instruction ‘come closer.’ Around both, the wall is covered with further text enlarged until the letters break into visible halftone dots. A band of alternating black and white lines runs the full circumference in French, listing what the work is about: love and desire, shame and hatred, who gets what, who owns what, who is remembered and who is forgotten. The word QUI is picked out in red each time, and two red crosses strike through TOI and then MOI.

A second quote covers the floor, from George Orwell’s 1984, spoken by O’Brien while he is torturing Winston Smith: ‘if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.’ Kruger has set it at a size nobody can read from inside the room, so visitors walk over the letters and take them in from the floors above. Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust, a two-video work first shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, in 1996, has been folded back into the rotunda, and puts face after face in front of the viewer, each one carrying want and threat at the same time.

Kruger describes The History of Tears as ‘an ongoing deluge of the eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust. This reservoir can accumulate through domination and conquest, both worldly and domestically,’ the artist notes. ‘It spurts in moments of global violence and brutality but also amidst the cruelties of intimacy. It can be both triumphalist in a massive sense but also drizzled like petty melodrama strewn with silly cartoons of seduction and rejection. It’s a bodily production that is both remembered and forgotten.

It’s a crying body lost amidst the wreckage of the battles for money, land, love and other bodies. To map this emotive fountain, to historicise it, can produce a narrative of profound struggle between the powerful and the disempowered, between the loved and the unloved, between winners and losers. It leaks shame, pride, belief and doubt in ways both intensely threatening and tragically comic. It can show and tell us how we were, how we are and how we will be to one another.’ 

remember me: more than 700 works from The Pinault Collection

Untitled (Remember me), the work the exhibition is named after, sits further on, in an alcove off the Passage: a close-up of an eye shot through with blood on an LED panel, and a stream of pixels issuing instructions that cancel each other out, ‘remember me, dismember me, forget me’, then ‘hug us, replace us, free us’, over an industrial soundtrack.

Surrounding Barbara Kruger’s installation are more than 700 works by over 80 artists displayed across the Bourse de Commerce’s galleries. Curated by Matthieu Humery, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, the exhibition pays tribute to the photographic medium through masterpieces and icons of the Pinault Collection. From Gustave Le Gray to Wolfgang Tillmans and from Dorothea Lange to Cindy Sherman, Humery has arranged the exhibition as a fugue rather than a chronology so the rooms move between genres and periods instead of marching through them. Gallery 2 is entirely dedicated to Irving Penn, bringing together more than 400 photographs, while Raymond Depardon’s series on France is also prominently exhibited in the gallery above.

project info:

exhibition name: Remember Me

location: Bourse de Commerce, Paris France | @boursedecommerce
dates: October 7, 2026 – January 18, 2027
curator: Matthieu Humery, Advisor for Photography of the Pinault Collection; with the collaboration of Lola Regard, Projects Officer

artwork name: The History of Tears
artist: Barbara Kruger