Imaginary Engine

The inaugural exhibition Imaginary Engine curated by internationally renowned curator Cecilia Alemani, explores the complex relationships between people, industry and machines. It brings together 50 modern masterpieces from the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture with newly commissioned works by contemporary artists.

From masterpieces in the Renault Collection to today’s artists

For its opening, Large presents Imaginary Engine, an exhibition conceived by curator Cecilia Alemani, a major figure on the international art scene.

Taking the distinctive history of île Seguin, once home to the Renault factories, as its starting point, the exhibition explores the connections between artistic creation, industry, innovation and society. Bringing historic works from the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture into dialogue with contemporary creations, it examines the major transformations of the modern world and the ways in which artists respond to them.

Bringing together more than one hundred works created from the 1930s to the present day, Imaginary Engine features 55 artists from 23 countries, nearly half of whom live or work in France. 17 artists were invited by Large to create new works especially for the exhibition.

Conceived as a journey through the industrial memory of île Seguin and the worlds of imagination it continues to inspire, the exhibition invites visitors to look afresh at the relationships between people, machines and the narratives that shape our time.

Directly connected to the legacy of the Renault factory on île Seguin, this first chapter revisits the pioneering “Recherche, Art et Industrie” programme launched by Renault in the late 1960s. The programme gave artists access to the factory and its material and human resources, enabling them to create works, some of them monumental in scale, by figures including Simon Hantaï, Julio Le Parc, Jean Tinguely, Jean Dubuffet, Victor Vasarely, Arman and Robert Doisneau.

Taking the car, the engine and the assembly line as metaphors for 20th-century social systems, this section brings together artists who subvert the rigid logic of industrial production through humour, chaos and even chance, including Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Erró, Thomas Bayrle, Arman, Zhenya Machneva (new commission), Nina Beier, Bertrand Lavier (new commission) and Alain Jacquet.

If the factory can be seen as a crucible of collective identities, the exhibition brings the lives and experiences of workers to the fore — particularly those of women and migrant workers — highlighting solidarity, memory, and forms of resistance and resilience within industrial life. These themes are explored through works by Leila Alaoui, Clément Cogitore (new commission), Giulia Andreani (new commission), Mohamed El Khatib (new commission) and Randa Maroufi.

Viewing the car as both an extension of the body and a fetish object, the works in this chapter explore its sensual charge and contested symbolism as a site of desire, identity and critique. The section also considers the car’s life cycle, its memory and its final metamorphosis through works by Shirin Aliabadi, Selma Selman, Niki de Saint Phalle, Kenneth Anger, Bianca Bondi (new commission) and Oliver Beer (new commission).

Faced with the prospect of a fully automated future, the works in this final section explore the increasingly blurred boundary between humans and machines, questioning the algorithmic systems that shape our lives and the transformations brought about by posthumanism. Artists include Théo Mercier (new commission), Valentin Ranger (new commission), Madeline Hollander, Daniel Otero Torres (new commission), Sara Sadik (new commission) and Monira Al Qadiri.