The A Summer in Le Havre adventure began in 2017 to mark the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the founding of the city and port. This grandiose anniversary, celebrated over several months, welcomed more than two million visitors.
“Beyond an “art route through the city”, I wanted art itself to travel through the city and cross it like an adventure. Let it transcend the border between private and public spaces, extend to new regions and delicately spill over into the summer season.
“Metamorphoses”, the laboratory of urban forms, where many stakeholders come and give us their vision of art in the city of tomorrow, is the first gathering in February. Continuing the many experiences of previous editions, the coming seasons will reveal all the fields artists are involved in today. They will show us that art in the public space can enlighten us about the omnipresence of digital technologies in our daily lives, bring video art to light where we least expect it, and increase the opportunities to encounter art, from painting and sculpture to fashion and the performing arts.
The artists will help us perceive this common language of the city, this energy which brings us together because it relates to everyone, whatever their background. Thus inspired, the city isn’t just the setting for our daily lives, but the constantly renewed possibility of transforming itself and looking towards the worlds of tomorrow.”
Gaël Charbau, Curator since 2023
Contemporary textile tour as part of the Textile Season
Presented in three museums and an art center in Nîmes from May 24 to September 21, 2025, the tour is punctuated by six large-scale installations that are particularly representative of the artist’s work and career into a dialogue with the venues where they are hosted.
Anna Labouze & Keimis Henni, who programmed the first edition of La Contemporaine de Nîmes in 2024, have been entrusted with the artistic direction of the tour.
Evariste Richer explores human representations to take their measure and excess. With rigor and poetry, he borrows from scientific and epistemological tools, standards and procedures, reinvents them and recounts the ineffable. Extending the story of the standard metre, deposited since 1799 in the iron cabinet of the French National Archives, and of the policy of unifying measurements under the Revolution, Les Métamètres offers a contemporary variation on space, time, perception and scale relationships. Each of the three sculptures, on the scale of the building, features a scale from 0 to 100, in reference to the standard metre, and a gradation of polychrome marble, from darkest to lightest. Between scenery and geological strata, Les Métamètres probe the history of the site in which they are set, playing on distortions in the visual experience. They underline the architecture while marking the entrances to the new premises of the Ministry of Culture, and invite visitors to stroll through the Quadrilatère des archives.
Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture under the 1% art scheme for the Camus project at the Quadrilatère des archives.
Crossings: A Choreography by Noé Soulier with the Participation of the Junior Ballet of the Opéra de Paris, presented by Villa Hegra.
Curators: Wejdan Reda and Arnaud Morand
“CROSSINGS”, AN IN-SITU DIALOGUE BETWEEN BODY AND LANDSCAPE
On December 13 and 14, 2024, the Junior Ballet of the Opéra de Paris, composed of 18 young dancers aged 18 to 22, performed for the first time in two shows in the heart of AlUla, within the canyons of this exceptional region. Noé Soulier’s creation Crossings, lasting 45 minutes, was specially designed to integrate harmoniously with the environment, with dancers moving directly on the sand and without any sound accompaniment.
The curators of the first phase of Villa Hegra’s program, Wejdan Reda and Arnaud Morand, state: “In the majestic and demanding desert of AlUla, Noé Soulier breathes a unique sense of scale into this new work: the dancers sometimes appear minuscule in the face of the vastness of the canyons and rock formations. Their bodies harmonize with the setting, becoming an extension of the landscape itself.”
Indeed, Crossings is a nomadic work that explores the relationship between the movement of bodies and the spaces they inhabit. It draws inspiration from the uniqueness of the place, marked by the millennia-old history of AlUla as a crossroads of civilizations.
NEUMA, The Forgotten Ceremony
An installation by artists Sarah Brahim and Ugo Schiavi, presented by Villa Hegra.
Curators: Wejdan Reda and Arnaud Morand
The American-Saudi artist Sarah Brahim and the French artist Ugo Schiavi present their collaborative work titled NEUMA, The Forgotten Ceremony. This installation marks the culmination of their participation in the Villa Hegra residency program. Designed as a symbolic gesture in homage to the ritual practices of the pre-Islamic tribes of AlUla, the work of Brahim and Schiavi is based on extensive research conducted in close collaboration with archaeologists and local communities in the region. Drawing inspiration from the landscape of AlUla, its local heritage, and its mythologies, this exhibition invites contemplation—an understated gesture that blends the ancient heritage of the site with contemporary creation, the profane and the sacred, through a collection of sculptures, videos, and photographic works.
The first six permanent works on the Grand Paris Express metro produced by the Eva Albarran agency were inaugurated in June 2024 to mark the opening of the southern extension of line 14, between Maison Blanche and Aéroport d’Orly. Designed by the artists in tandem with the station architects, they are closely linked to the station architecture and mark the first stage in a major network-wide art collection.
Artists : Ned Kahn for Maison Blanche, Eva Jospin for Hôpital Bicêtre, Nonotak for L’Haÿ-les-Roses, Steiner & Lenzlinger for Chevilly-Larue, Lyès Hammadouche for Thiais – Orly, and Vhils for Aéroport d’Orly.
Client: Société des Grands Projets
Artistic director: José-Manuel Goncalves
Artistic coordination: Le Centquatre-Paris
Design and production: Agence Eva Albarran
Contractor: Manifesto
Paris – Always at the crossroads of art and innovation, Christie’s welcomes Felice Varini, a pioneering artist of geometry and colour, for an original installation. Created specifically for the Christie’s spaces on the occasion of the prestigious sales of 20th and 21st century art, this monumental work, entitled Eccentric Hollow Discs, will be unveiled from today.
Designed to interact fully with the architecture of the building, this new spatial painting unfolds over several floors inside the building. Composed of two intertwined spirals of yellow and red, the work seems to dissolve and recompose itself simultaneously before the viewer’s gaze. These eccentric hollowed-out discs create a fascinating dialogue between full and empty, the materiality of the work and the surrounding space, finite and infinite.
As a virtuoso of space, Felice Varini overturns the traditional perception of form and volume. From a precise point of view, his geometric lines connect to form a coherent two-dimensional image. But as the visitor moves around, the work transforms, offering a multitude of possible points of view and interpretations. The resulting heightened awareness of space invites visitors to explore the relationship between themselves, the work and their environment.
As well as the artwork in the building, Felice Varini has also taken over the elegant façade of Christie’s House. Bold graphic motifs are displayed on the building’s windows, as a visual invitation to step through the doors and discover the artist’s world inside.