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Houellebecq lights up Paris with photography show—and a smoking room

Controversial author caters for fellow smokers at Palais de Tokyo show

Gareth Harris
17 June 2016
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The controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq will be giving smokers a break in Paris next week; his new exhibition of photographs at the Palais de Tokyo (Rester Vivant, 23 June-11 September) includes a room for nicotine lovers. “It’s just me having a fraternal thought for my fellow addicts,” Houellebecq tells us. The smoking room includes a bar and jukebox which will pay musical versions of 70 of his poems. 

The award-winning author says the show feels like “a return to poetry”. He says: “I’ve organised the rooms so they follow one another, like a book-length collection in which the poems produce a narrative by being placed in a certain order, even if it remains far vaguer than in a novel.”

Various aspects of French culture and architecture are depicted in Houellebecq’s photographs. One image, France #014 (1994), shows the word “Europe” carved in concrete. Asked about the UK’s referendum on whether to remain in the European Union, which is on the day his exhibition opens, Houellebecq says: “The French are as torn as the English.”

Other works depict life in Paris, “the France I have most experience of”, Houellebecq says. “I’ve generally lived in the suburbs. They aren’t rural areas, more like peri-urban zones—in other words, where people now vote Front National,” he writes in the catalogue.

The first room of the exhibition includes an image emblazoned with the words Il est temps de faire vos jeux (it is time to place your bets); the sentence is taken from one of Houellebecq’s poems entitled The Memory of the Sea, while a section on women includes two series of six photographs. The exhibition also includes works by the Lyon-born artist Robert Combas and Vietnam-based Renaud Marchand, along with two MRI scans of Houellebecq’s brain.

Houellebecq’s health has also come under the spotlight in Manifesta 11, in Zurich (until 18 September). As part of the biennial, the surgeon Henry Perschak gave Houellebecq a check-up, and visitors can see the results.

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