In 2025, the Fondation decided to award its Prize in a new form: the Nouveau Programme.
This evolution attests to a desire to accompany artists over the long term, according to new formats and conditions. Loyal to its approach founded on collaboration and involvement at the curatorial level, the Fondation assigns a guest curator to each edition of the programme. In consultation with the Fondation, three artists are selected by this guest curator. In order to increase the visibility around their respective practices, we agree to provide critical guidance prior to the exhibition held in the spaces of the Fondation Pernod Ricard and to follow up with a tailored project after the exhibition has ended.
This evolution attests to a desire to accompany artists over the long term, according to new formats and conditions. Loyal to its approach founded on collaboration and involvement at the curatorial level, the Fondation assigns a guest curator to each edition of the programme. In consultation with the Fondation, three artists are selected by this guest curator. In order to increase the visibility around their respective practices, we agree to provide critical guidance prior to the exhibition held in the spaces of the Fondation Pernod Ricard and to follow up with a tailored project after the exhibition has ended.
Within the framework of the Nouveau Programme of the Fondation Pernod Ricard, exhibition curator Liberty Adrien brings together three artists from different backgrounds: Saodat Ismailova, Alexandre Khondji and Hélène Yamba-Guimbi. Their practices deploy unique artistic composition, while sharing an attention to elusive elements: the linearity of narrative, static systems of representation and established certainties. This curatorial decision conveys a desire to support the plurality of contemporary practices and bring out voices that continue
to be less audible within the French institutional landscape, while weaving resonances between their perspectives, expressing fragmented stories, multiple temporalities and suspended spaces.
“The title of the exhibition, Sorry Sun, evokes an ambivalent light – between warmth and burning, light and dark, dazzlement and fatigue. It is in this interstice that the exhibition takes shape. The artworks presented draw the outlines of a sensitive cartography of maladjustment, allowing the fractures of the present to show through: the erosion of frameworks and social ideals, disenchantment at the promises of a now uncertain technological progress and the intensification of the environmental crisis. Implicitly, they also reveal the persistence of beliefs, stories and popular rituals – fragments of memory that are both personal and collective and discreet forms of narrative resistance.
