Image: MAC VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine
MAC VAL is presenting 'Ici grand ouvert', an exhibition by SMITH, according to the museum’s August newsletter. The artist, described there as a researcher born in 1985, works across photography, moving image, installation, sculpture and performance, and structures the work in open cycles often initiated by photography.
The newsletter frames the exhibition as a survey of a practice that resists fixed chronology. Rather than moving in a straight line, SMITH’s work is presented as shifting between portrait and landscape while opening an imagined space in which the human, animal, vegetal, mineral and celestial realms intersect. That emphasis on permeable categories runs through the museum’s description of the project.
The newsletter also places 'Ici grand ouvert' within MAC VAL’s broader summer programming in Vitry-sur-Seine, where the museum says it remains open to all audiences throughout the season. Alongside exhibitions and family activities, the museum is offering outdoor creative workshops, moving visits for children and adults, and other public programs, but 'Ici grand ouvert' remains the main exhibition focus in the announcement.
A related event is scheduled around the exhibition on Sunday, 2 August, at 4 pm. Titled 'Les petites mues', it brings together people close to SMITH’s practice to share their perspectives on the artist’s work. The museum presents this as a conversation built around the exhibition rather than a separate thematic project.
The newsletter also lists regular guided visits for the exhibition on Saturdays at 4 pm, described as visits to SMITH’s 'Ici grand ouvert'. These tours are framed as an invitation to enter the artist’s world through the same range of media highlighted in the exhibition notice: photography, moving image, installation, sculpture and performance.
MAC VAL’s notice leaves the exhibition’s exact run dates unstated in the material provided, but it makes clear that 'Ici grand ouvert' is one of the museum’s featured summer exhibitions, alongside 'Le genre idéal', an exhibition of the collection, and 'Tu hurles quelque chose à la mode', an exhibition by Fabienne Gaston-Dreyfus. The July and August newsletter places SMITH’s project within that wider seasonal programme at the museum in Vitry-sur-Seine.
