Image: musée d'Art contemporain du Val-de-Marne
The Musée d’Art contemporain du Val-de-Marne has announced an exhibition by SMITH titled "Ici grand ouvert." The museum’s notice presents SMITH as a researcher-artist born in 1985 whose practice moves across photography, moving image, installation, sculpture and performance. The exhibition positions that cross-disciplinary approach at the center of its public presentation, underscoring the museum’s interest in work that resists fixed medium categories.
According to the museum text, SMITH’s work is organized in open cycles, often initiated by photography. Rather than treating images as endpoints, the artist uses them as starting points for broader constellations of forms and ideas. The museum describes this method as one that unsettles chronology and shifts the boundaries between portrait and landscape, suggesting a practice built less around a single style than around a sustained inquiry into how images structure perception.
That emphasis gives "Ici grand ouvert" wider significance within contemporary art discourse. The exhibition’s framing points to current debates around expanded photography and hybrid practice, where the image is no longer confined to the flat surface of the photograph but becomes part of installations, performances and sculptural arrangements. By foregrounding an artist who works across those registers, the museum is highlighting a body of work that reflects how many contemporary artists now operate between disciplines rather than within them.
The museum also emphasizes the conceptual reach of SMITH’s work. Its description says the practice opens a space in which the human, animal, vegetal, mineral and celestial realms intertwine. That formulation suggests an artistic vocabulary attentive to relations across species, materials and scales, and to ways of thinking that move beyond conventional human-centered representation. In a museum context, such an approach can resonate with broader curatorial questions around ecology, embodiment and the reimagining of landscape.
While the source material provides only a brief institutional announcement, it is clear that the exhibition is being presented as an important contemporary art event for the Val-de-Marne museum. The museum’s platform gives the work a setting that matches its open, process-based structure, and the title "Ici grand ouvert" reinforces the sense of permeability and expanded looking that the text describes. For audiences following the development of artist-researchers working at the intersection of image-making and installation, the exhibition signals a practice to watch.
The announcement matters because it reflects a major museum’s commitment to artists whose work does not fit neatly into a single medium or narrative. In a field where photography, performance and installation increasingly overlap, exhibitions such as this help define how institutions frame new modes of image-based art. SMITH’s exhibition, as presented by the musée d’Art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, places that question front and center.
