Timeline

24. April 2026

What is the idea behind the exhibition Timeline? How do contemporary artists develop the themes of František Kupka’s works? And how are the themes of the exhibition relevant again?

Explore the exhibition Timeline through the eyes of curators Nicolas Bourriaud and Barbara Lagié.

Timeline is inspired by František Kupka’s illustrations for Élisée Recluse’s L’Homme et la Terre (Man and Earth) (1905), which depicted the history of humanity through its relationship with nature. Reclus saw our planet as a living organism and human societies as shaped by long-term forces. The French geographer and the Czech painter shared a worldview in which humanity is inseparable from its ecosystems – terrestrial, atmospheric and cosmological – and where time does not unfold as a sequence of individual events, but as a continuum of global transformations.

At a time when climate change is making us feel more and more urgently the reality of our entry into the Anthropocene, Reclus’s ideas – and the illustrations Kupka created for them – seem more relevant than ever. Timeline is an exhibition that brings together 14 international artists around Kupka’s drawings and around four concepts emerging from the artist-geographer’s encounter: the idea of ​​relational space (the world is made up of active agents, not inert matter), deep time (including natural and cosmic cycles), totalization (the desire to synthesize vast data and abstract ideas), and a new animist spirit inspired by 19th-century symbolism.
Nicolas Bourriaud

The exhibition is curated by Nicolas Bourriaud.
In collaboration with Barbara Lagie.

 

Artists

Francis Kupka
Alex Cerveny
Bianca Argimón
Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil
Romain Bernini
Caroline Corbasson
Patrick Van Caeckenbergh
Bharti Kher
Verne Dawson
Patricia Domínguez
Katja Novitskova
Marguerite Humeau
Charles Avery
Suzanne Treister
Jura Shust