This event follows on from the exhibition on German painting held at Carré d'art during the summer of 2005. Here again, Où? Scènes du Sud (Where? Scenes of the South) seeks to revisit after 20 years the broad lines on which Carré d'art bases its acquisition policy.

It is the first part of a series of two events, focussing in 2007 on the art scene in Italy, Spain and Portugal, the countries designated in the early 1980s as the "Mediterranean Arc", then in 2008 on the entrance of the eastern Mediterranean countries into the field of contemporary creation.

Although not dominant in market terms, these scenes incorporate the new rules of a contemporary art world that is more elusive, more open to all kinds of cross-fertilizations. The selected artists, born between 1965 and 1975, have daily experience of displacement and migration across the surface of the globe while maintaining strong ties with their home base. Using a variety of media (volume, installation, video, drawing), the works are chiefly fuelled by their powerful rapport with reality. Through burlesque sketches, pseudo-experiments or short fables illustrating popular adages, they highlight some astonishing human types drawn from a variety of social groups and look into man's fragile relationship with his environment and history. The artist, who sometimes acts out these protocols, appears as a modern Don Quixote who gently stands up to authority figures, common laws, and can even go so far as to challenge the space-time framework. Certain works redefine life's basic components such as walking, breathing, gestures, gravity, and are to be seen as metaphors of a kind of sensory communication on a human scale.

Leaving to one side a large part of this fascination with the game of self-reference found in art and the media, these works confirm art's ability to offer representations addressing issues of creation and perception, identity and memory that are sensitive, often figurative, almost narrative even.

ARTISTS ON SHOW: Mario Airò, Leonor Antunes, Micol Assaël, Massimo Bartolini, Marco Boggio Sella, Rui Calçada Bastos, Roberto Cuoghi, Paul Ekaitz, Jon Mikel Euba, Lara Favaretto, Flavio Favelli, Giuseppe Gabellone, Stefania Galegati, Dora García, Piero Golia, Enrique Marty, Marzia Migliora, João Onofre, Jesus Palomino, Diego Perrone, Alessandro Pessoli, Jaime Pitarch, Paola Pivi, Sergio Prego, Jorge Queiroz, Tere Recarens, Francesc Ruiz, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Sancho Silva, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Santiago Ydáñez.

The bilingual French/English catalogue is published jointly with Archibooks + Sautereau éditeurs. Texts by Françoise Cohen, David Torres, Giorgio Verzotti and Delfim Sardo