About
Our Mission
The Jeu de Paume is an arts center with a strong reputation for exhibiting and promoting all forms of mechanical and electronic imagery (photography, cinema, video, installation, web art, etc.). As well as organizing or co-organizing exhibitions, it hosts film programs, symposia, seminars, and educational activities, and also publishes a range of material. With its high-profile exhibitions of established, little-known and emerging artists (notably the Satellite program), the Jeu de Paume ties together different narrative strands, mixing the historic and the contemporary, oscillating between resonance and dissonance, attracting broad and diverse audiences.
Beyond its flagship building on Place de la Concorde, Paris, the Jeu de Paume has, since 2010, developed a partnership with the city of Tours for the presentation of exhibitions with a more historic resonance at the Château de Tours. These events showcase donations made to the state and archives conserved by public and private institutions both in France and abroad in a program designed to attract new categories of visitor from the region. As well as being shown at these two venues, exhibitions organized by the Jeu de Paume are seen around the world thanks to collaboration, interaction, and cooperation with other national or international institutions on the basis of mutual affinities.
Since 2007 the Jeu de Paume has been working to expand its online activities, developing a dedicated “virtual space” with an innovative program of special web-based projects and thematic shows entrusted to curators specializing in the digital arts. Film programs are devised to accompany many of the exhibitions, or to pay tribute to major figures of the independent filmmaking scene in France and abroad. Specializing in documentary, essay, and autobiography, with an emphasis on previously unscreened work, the programming helps bring filmmakers together with artists. All activities at the Jeu de Paume are driven by a deep concern for interdisciplinarity in the study of visual culture and images, and by a quest for new meaning in all fields of thought. Talks, seminars, and symposia explore the questions and themes raised by the exhibitions, helping to open up new spaces for critical interaction.
The Jeu de Paume’s modular space enables it to adapt to the varying demands imposed by its activities and confirms its ambition to provide all its users with an active hub and resource center for education in photographic imagery and the history of representation and the visual arts. Tours and courses, initiatives for students and teachers, and activities for families and young visitors, are the focal points of its didactic program. The emphasis here is on participation rather than contemplation, exchange rather than the “colonization of knowledge,” and sharing rather than the monopolization of ideas. The Jeu de Paume’s program at the Château de Tours also helps extend the dynamic of these educational activities regionally.
Le magazine, an online publication launched in 2010, draws on a range of resources (video, photo gallery, audio and text files) to extend the debate to the use of images in the digital era. Le magazine is a unique platform for artistic content, in-depth articles, virtual tours, and portfolios. It is a web-based forum for dialogue between historians, philosophers, artists, curators, filmmakers, poets, and the art lovers. Finally, the Jeu de Paume is home to a high-quality bookshop dedicated to offering an ambitiously comprehensive selection of books and publications to further knowledge of the artists, photographers, and filmmakers showcased by the institution. It holds a permanent stock of some ten thousand titles on aesthetics, art history and theory, cinema, photography, and new technologies.
