Image: FRAC Occitanie Montpellier
Carcassonne will host 'Pop-Up Collections' from 5 June to 17 October 2026, a citywide contemporary art parcours unfolding across five heritage locations. The exhibition is presented as a collaboration between collections from FRAC Occitanie Montpellier, Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse, and the Musée des beaux-arts de Carcassonne, with a vernissage scheduled for 4 June at 6:30 pm. Entry to the five sites is free.
The project is framed as a dialogue between regional collections rather than a single-venue show. According to the Frac Occitanie Montpellier announcement and the City of Carcassonne’s agenda listing, the exhibition brings together photographs, paintings, sculptures and installations in a route through the Musée des beaux-arts, the Centre d’art contemporain, the Chapelle des Dominicaines, the Halle aux Grains and the Chapelle du Petit Saint-Gimer. The institutions describe the route as an invitation to move through the city and encounter works in spaces that have themselves been shaped by history.
At the centre of the exhibition is the theme of art and history. The Frac notes that 'Art et histoires' serves as the guiding thread, beginning with Jean-Paul Laurens’s 'Les Emmurés de Carcassonne', painted in 1879. The work, from the Musée des beaux-arts collection, is cited as one of the rare pieces in that museum’s holdings to address the city’s religious past in the Middle Ages through the episode of the liberation of the Albigensians imprisoned by the Inquisition. The exhibition highlights, in particular, the gesture of appeasement made by the Franciscan Bernard Délicieux toward the people of Carcassonne, a detail also said to have inspired the exhibition poster.
The curators say the exhibition uses that point of departure to open onto multiple stories within larger historical narratives. The Frac description states that the works address conflict, domination, displacement and the exploitation of resources, while also making room for more intimate accounts rooted in inheritance, family memory, everyday practices and solitude. The exhibition text presents these works as a way of testing certainties and offering new readings of past and present events, without reducing the artists to a single position or message.
The artist list includes more than 50 names from different periods, origins and nationalities. Among those named in the source material are Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Alighiero e Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Nicolas Daubanes, Esther Ferrer, Alfredo Jaar, Suzanne Lafont, Boris Mikhaïlov, Roméo Mivekannin, Marie Orensanz, Simone Decker, Thomas Tudoux, Xavier Veilhan and Gil J Wolman. The Frac says the works are drawn from the collections of the three partner institutions, and notes that all the photographs used for the exhibition documentation are by Christian Perez.
Each site in Carcassonne is assigned a different emphasis. At the Musée des beaux-arts, works in the temporary galleries and among the permanent collections are presented in relation to art history and historical memory. At the Centre d’art contemporain, housed in the 19th-century former Banque de France building, each room is devoted to a single artist for a more intimate encounter. In the Chapelle des Dominicaines, Xavier Veilhan’s monumental work refers to equestrian and martial statuary. At the Halle aux Grains, Simone Decker’s photoluminescent silhouettes are presented as an alternative to the usual display of monumental sculpture in public space. The Chapelle du Petit Saint-Gimer brings together school projects developed by teachers in Carcassonne from the exhibition’s theme, alongside Thomas Tudoux’s 'Le mérite c’est nous', a collective and cumulative protocol to be activated across several summer meetings.
A trilingual exhibition journal in French, English and Spanish will accompany visitors, with graphic design by Camille Moreau and Fabien Coupas. The journal retraces the curators’ pathway and offers short commentaries on each work and artist. The exhibition is supported by the City of Carcassonne, the Mairie de Toulouse, the Occitanie Region and the French Ministry of Culture, and runs to 17 October 2026 across the five Carcassonne sites.
