To celebrate its twentieth anniversary, the Musée régional d’art contemporain Occitanie in Sérignan has invited curator Fabrice Bousteau to conceive an XXL and boldly ambitious exhibition event. Stop The Machine! unfolds across the museum’s 3,200 m², presenting more than 400 works drawn from the three contemporary art collections of the Occitanie Region: the Frac Occitanie Montpellier, the Frac Occitanie Toulouse – Les Abattoirs, and the Mrac Occitanie in Sérignan.

This exhibition, developed through a hybrid methodology, combines traditional curatorial research with the exploration of artificial intelligence tools applied to the classification of the vast corpus of works and their installation. Working “with” and “against” the machine in order to assert curatorial choices was the starting point for the project, when the colours of iconic works by Daniel Buren – Rotation, travail in situ and La cabane éclatée aux caissons lumineux colorés – emerged as an obvious choice for creating a new and experimental exhibition layout.

Far from traditional thematic or chronological exhibitions, Stop The Machine! offers a sensory experience moving from colour to colour, from shadow to light, from participation to contemplation. The works of 250 artists engage in dialogue, complement one another or confront one another in a free-flowing, labyrinthine journey that crosses eras, practices, generations and origins.

Stop The Machine! bears witness to the exceptional quality of the collections, celebrates the present and opens a new chapter…