The City of Nîmes is pleased to announce the creation of a new multidisciplinary and international event dedicated to contemporary art. Titled “Contemporaine de Nîmes” and held every three years, its inaugural edition will take place throughout the city in spring 2024. It will revolve around a major exhibition in the form of an itinerary through public spaces and a dozen cultural and heritage sites. The exhibition will bring together several dozen established and emerging international and French artists and will be punctuated by events which will put in dialogue various art fields.
The artistic direction of this first edition has been entrusted by the Mayor, Jean-Paul Fournier, to the duo Anna Labouze & Keimis Henni, who will unveil their project next September.
The City of Nîmes has thus chosen young artistic directors, for whom this will be the first large-scale city-wide event. This choice reflects a renewal of perspectives and approaches to such types of events, while highlighting the emerging art scene.
The City aims for this new artistic and cultural event to offer an ambitious, committed, unifying and long-lasting project, in line with current issues. Both international and local, it is also intended to be closely linked to the territory of Nîmes, its history, its singularities, its actors and its inhabitants.
This announcement comes within the framework of the 30th anniversary of Carré d’art – The Museum of Contemporary Art of the City of Nîmes, and in the continuity of both a historical and ongoing commitment from the City in favor of art and culture. Through this new event, the Mayor of Nîmes, its elected officials and departments have decided to renew and strengthen this commitment.
About Anna Labouze & Keimis Henni
Artistic directors, curators, teachers and independent cultural project holders.
Founders and Directors of Artagon – Co-Directors of the Magasins Généraux.
Born in 1991, Anna Labouze & Keimis Henni are a duo of artistic directors, curators, teachers and cultural project holders. Their fields of interest are emerging art, the relationship between art, society and education, and dialogues between different art fields and international cultural cooperation projects.
In 2014, they founded Artagon, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting, promoting and accompanying artists and cultural professionals as they launch their careers. From 2015 to 2019, Artagon’s activity centered around the organization of «The International Art School Students Exhibition»; an event that brought together 30 to 50 selected artists from several French and European art schools, each year, in Paris. During the health emergency of 2020, they established a support fund for art school students. They also launched the Bourse Horizon, a financial grant program for artists who graduated from art schools in 2020. Between 2021 and 2022, they have opened three art residency locations, dedicated to supporting emerging arts: Artagon Marseille, Artagon Pantin in the Greater Paris area and Maison Artagon in the Loiret region.
In 2017, they joined the Magasins Généraux, a cultural venue founded by the communication agency BETC in Pantin; first as Curators, then as Artistic Directors. Tasked with designing the program, they have curated a dozen exhibitions and festivals over the past six years. In June 2022, they were named Co-Directors of the Magasins Généraux alongside Julia Dartois.
From 2020 onwards, Anna Labouze & Keimis Henni have been teaching cultural project management as part of the Master’s program “Contemporary Art and its Exhibition” at Sorbonne University. They also are among the main lecturers in the support program for young graduates of the École des Arts Décoratifs de Paris and are members of several juries and committees.
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