Image: View of the exhibition “The History of Tears” by Barbara Kruger, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, 2026. © Tadao Ando Architect & Associates, Niney et Marca Architectes, agence Pierre-Antoine Gatier. Courtesy of the artist, Sprüth Magers and David Zwirner. Photo: Florent Michel
In the Rotunda and the museum’s twenty-four display cases, Barbara Kruger presents ‘The History of Tears’, an installation conceived specifically for the exhibition. Words, images and voices fill the space in an immersive work where the political and the intimate, power and desire, fear and violence intertwine.
Designed specifically for the Museum Rotunda and its surrounding twenty-four Display Cases, the exhibition immerses viewers in a constant flow of words, phrases, and messages. These take the form of filmed sequences and audio clips, creating a continuous movement of language across the installation.
At the very heart of the Museum, Tadao Ando’s curved walls feature epic quotations taken from literary works including George Orwell’s ‘1984’ and Aimé Césaire’s ‘Journal of a Homecoming’. In the Passage, the twenty-four Display Cases have been transformed into lightboxes carrying messages penned by Kruger, an American artist born in 1945.
Two videos have been integrated into the exhibition’s new layout. ‘Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust’, created and installed by Kruger at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, was exhibited for the first time in 1996 before being shown in a variety of settings that nevertheless always involved a textual environment.
The works confront the viewer with a succession of faces, gazes, and words expressing a combination of desire, domination, fear, and violence.
Between verbal saturation and visual immersion, Kruger has composed a total work of art in which the personal and the political and language and the body collide. The resulting hypnotic whirlwind has a remarkable resonance that remains fully relevant today.
