Palais de Tokyo Founder to Lead Fledgling Mexican Culture Center
French critic and curator Jérôme Sans, who twenty years in the past cofounded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris with Nicolas Borriaud, will function the inaugural inventive director of cultural heart Lago/Algo, which opened in February in Mexico Metropolis, ArtReview studies. Lago/Algo, which occupies a restored 1964 lakefront pavilion in Chapultepec Park, is a dual-purpose cultural hub, with the Lago house housing a restaurant, and the Algo house serving as an arts venue underneath the auspices of Mexico Metropolis’s Galería OMR. The gallery in a press launch referred to Algo as a “vibrant laboratory for brand new social and cultural fashions enlightened by essentially the most radical modern practices.”
Sans is not any stranger to the idea of the laboratory, having with Borriaud grown the Palais de Tokyo inside only a few years to France’s largest non-collecting museum of up to date artwork and some of the essential arts establishments in Europe. Following a two-year stint as inventive director of the Baltic Centre for Modern Artwork in Gateshead, UK, he served from 2008 to 2012 as the primary director of Beijing’s Ullens Middle for Modern Artwork (now UCCA Middle for Modern Artwork). He has curated quite a lot of worldwide exhibitions, together with the Taipei Biennial, the Lyon Biennial, and the Danish pavilion on the Venice Biennale.
Lago/Algo has courted controversy since being introduced as a part of a billion-peso ($50 million) overhaul of the closely forested park, which is continuously characterised as Mexico Metropolis’s “lungs” and which comprises 9 different museums, together with the Museo Tamayo and the Museo Nacional de Antropología. Critics have appeared askance on the handing over of Algo, an ostensibly nonprofit public house, to a industrial gallery. Artist Gabriel Orozco, who in 2021 was appointed by Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to take cost of the park reimagining, has been accused of spending profligately on the mission whereas the federal arts price range has suffered extreme cuts and humanities establishments in much less rich areas go unserved.
