Nilbar Güreş, Július Koller, Roman Ondak, Mladen Stilinović

• Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
• 13.11.–01.12.2024

The exhibition The Cynics Republic offers a counter-narrative of the history of performance. It looks at the emergence of ‘performative practice’ from Antiquity onwards and seeks to recover the relevance of the values of ancient cynicism — truth, self-sufficiency, endurance, sobriety and free sexuality — in the context of today’s social and ecological challenges. The Cynics Republic offers visitors the chance to experience an exhibition constructed as a score and that will be renewed on a daily basis over the course of three weeks thanks to the use of dematerialized resources (scores, protocols, films and sound pieces) from the national collections of the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap) and the Kontakt collection in Vienna. The Cynics Republic proposes to approach the resources of these collections from the perspective of a repertoire of immemorial gestures. Works will be activated on a daily basis by artists and performers, with the selection updated according to a weekly theme: dishonour (a critical alternative to competitiveness), shamelessness (an anticipation of a state of nature) and finally destitution (an ethic of animality).

Palais de Tokyo