Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France
October 7, 2026–January 2027
Designed specifically for the Rotunda and display cases at the Bourse de Commerce, Barbara Kruger’s The History of Tears exhibition confronts visitors with an uninterrupted flow of words, phrases, injunctions, filmed sequences, and voices.
At the heart of the museum, Tadao Ando’s curved walls become the support for monumental quotations borrowed in particular from the literary works 1984 (1949) by George Orwell and Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1947) by Aimé Césaire, while the twenty-four display cases of the Passage, transformed into light boxes, punctuate the space with Kruger’s brilliant injunctions.
This ensemble is complemented by two videos, now reinstalled in this new setting. Created and edited by the artist at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust was first presented in 1996 and subsequently shown several times in different contexts, always linked to a textual environment. The works confront the viewer with a succession of faces, gazes, and words where desire, domination, fear, and violence intertwine. Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Kruger composes a total work where the intimate and the political, the body and language, collide in a hypnotic vortex whose impact resonates today with striking acuity.
Barbara Kruger states on The History of Tears:
“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. 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 historicize 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.”
The History of Tears is curated by Matthieu Humery, photography advisor to the Pinault Collection, with the collaboration of Lola Regard, project manager.
Learn more at the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection.
