GROUP SHOW • SHAPING THE POSSIBLE

OPENING: SATURDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2026 (2PM-7PM)
EXHIBITION FROM 21 NOVEMBER 2026 TO 16 JANUARY 2027

Artists: Anne-Camille Allueva, Catherine Balet, Vincent Ballard, Rachelle Bussières, Juan Couder, Renato D’Agostin, Martin Désilets, Máté Dobokay, Joanne Dugan, Vittoria Gerardi, Hideyuki Ishibashi, Morvarid K, Thomas Paquet, Malcolm Pate, Jean de Pomereu, Gilles Pourtier, Marleen Sleeuwits, Charles Xelot.

“The enemy of photography is convention.”, László Moholy-Nagy (Vision in Motion, 1947)

Two hundred years after its invention, what possibilities still lie ahead for photography? As institutions and galleries across France mark the bicentenary of photography by looking back at two centuries of artistic and technological innovation, we opt for a different approach. Rather than revisiting photography's past, the gallery turns its attention to its future. Curated by Thierry Bigaignon, Shaping the Possible brings together some twenty artists whose work challenges established ideas about photography, reconsiders its boundaries, and opens up new ways of understanding the medium.

Photography has never stood still. From its beginnings as a means of recording the visible world, it has evolved into an artistic language of extraordinary richness and complexity, far beyond its original documentary function. Yet for all the ground covered over the past two centuries, we may have barely begun to explore its full potential. At a time when images are created, replicated, and circulated on an unprecedented scale, artists are increasingly questioning not just what photography does, but what photography can be.

What happens when photography no longer seeks to represent reality? When it no longer requires a camera, a print, or even a wall? When it takes the form of sculpture, becomes an exploration of matter, or unfolds as an experience of light and time? What if the photographic image were no longer something fixed and permanent, but something fragile, unstable, or destined to disappear? And how does artificial intelligence, with its ability to generate images untethered from the physical world, challenge our understanding of what it means to make a photograph? Bringing together works that engage with both historical techniques and emerging technologies, Shaping the Possible ventures into the increasingly fluid space between photography and other disciplines, from sculpture and architecture to chemistry, physics, and new forms of image-making.

At the heart of the exhibition lies a particularly compelling proposition: what if photography's future were no longer confined to two dimensions? For much of its history, photography has been presented as a flat image, framed and hung on a wall. But what if the next chapter were to unfold in three dimensions? The exhibition itself gives shape to this idea, bringing photographic objects, sculptural forms, and spatial interventions into conversation. Practices once considered peripheral to photography might well become central to its future. Here, light is more than the means by which an image is made: it becomes the subject of the work itself. Time is no longer simply measured in fractions of a second; it becomes an active force, altering materials, transforming surfaces, and shaping the creative process. Even the photographic support, traditionally a passive surface on which an image appears, takes on a life of its own, becoming an essential part of the artistic enquiry.

Rather than offering a single vision of what photography might become, Shaping the Possible embraces a multiplicity of perspectives. Each work puts forward its own hypothesis, suggests a different direction, and invites us to imagine an alternative future. Together, they reveal a medium whose greatest strength may lie in its refusal to be confined by any fixed definition. Perhaps the challenge is no longer to push photography beyond its limits, but to recognise that those limits are themselves increasingly difficult to define. And perhaps that is what makes this bicentenary so meaningful: the realisation that photography is defined not only by what it allows us to see, but by everything it has yet to make possible.

This exhibition has received the official label of the French Ministry of Culture as part of the Bicentenary of Photography, celebrated across France from September 2026 to September 2027.