De haut en bas New York 5, 2009 New York 4, 2009 New York 8, 2009 Cosmocity I, Technique mixte sur papier, 2009 Cosmocity II, Technique mixte sur papier, 2009

23 June - 29 August 2010 This exhibition focuses on a little known but nonetheless important apect of the extremely diverse work of Aki Kuroda, and features photographs displayed alongside a new series of drawings. As a child in Japan, Aki Kuroda learned about the visual arts thanks to the famous 1930s magazine The Minotaur, and was deeply impressed when he discovered the work of Picasso and Dali. He found the weight of ancestral Japanes traditions hard to bear, and chose to leave Tokyo for a journey across Europe and the US. He settled in Paris in 1970 and has never stopped wandering through his adopted city, like Benjamin's "flâneur". He made some decisive encounters in Paris - the novelist Marguerite Duras, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Serre (who contributed to Noise, an artistic and cultural magazine created in 1985), the writer Pascal Quignard, the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, for whose ballet Parade (2008) he designed the sets and costumes, as well as astrophysicians, psychoanalysts and many others. Aki Kuroda moves between cultures, between East and West, between the pure tranquillity of zen and the colourful chaos of graffiti, between the soul and the body, between ancient myths and the future that remains to be invented, and between the arts: drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture, frescoes, photography, set-making, installations and scenography. Since the 1990s, he has been wiorking on a unique project, Cosmogarden, a series of performances involving dancers and architects. Kuroda's aim is to be a thinker and, as far as possible, a reformer of the city: the functionalist western city having admitted its failures, "the artist must create a new space within the city, something twisted, something fallow, so that people can find the human dimension once more", he says. The photographs of New York presented at the MEP, along with some 15 drawings, can be seen as a travelogue or an intimate private diary, expressing the vital energy of the city, the flows that run through it, the lights of its street signs and advertisiements creating a kind of urban script that captures the limitless magic of New York. Films : To accompany the Aki Kuroda exhibition, four films representing different approaches to Manhattan can be freely consulted at the Video Libray. For more information, see Current Events/Films".