GLASS SKIN 165*357
CENTRE POMPIDOU PARIS I FRANCE 2025
A ritual of stripping an poetic disobedience at the Centre Pompidou Museum.
Performative Installation composed of 33 polyester films with ionized metal layers, e 165 × 357cm each, extracted from the glass facade of the Centre Pompidou, Paris 2025.
“We skinned the Centre Pompidou,” declares the artist.
Not to destroy it, but to reveal it.
By peeling away the black solar film that once covered the museum’s windows,designed to filter light and protect the artworks, he performs a radical gesture of liberation.
This act is a shedding, a transformation, both violent and necessary.
On the eve of its long closure for renovation, the museum turns itself inside out. Before disappearing for five years, it opens up, exposing what lies beneath. This inaugural act of stripping becomes a ritual of passage, marking the threshold between two states of existence.
The tearing away of the museum’s skin was not an authorized intervention. It emerged outside institutional frameworks, driven by poetic disobedience rather than rebellion. It is a spontaneous, physical, and nocturnal gesture that questions the relationship between power, material, and freedom. Through this act, the artist exposes what the institution tends to conceal: the building’s fragile truth, its light, its vulnerability.
The removed material, once an invisible technical layer, becomes the raw matter of an artwork. It is an architectural ready-made born from a real extraction. The act of removal becomes a process; the building becomes a body. This is not restoration, it is revelation.
Under the light, the torn film reveals a metallic black that is deep, liquid, and alive. It absorbs and bends light until it appears transformed. What once filtered light now reflects it. The museum’s skin inverts itself, hardens, and turns into a mirror.
Each fragment carries the marks of time: dust, scratches, faded reflections. Together they form a fragmented landscape, a topography of shadows and reflections, a fossilized memory of the museum. Detached from the building, the skin ceases to be an envelope. It becomes an autonomous presence, an architectural fragment turned into a trace of memory made visible.
By reversing the logic of protection, the installation transforms the museum into a field of political experimentation. It is no longer the institution that exhibits the work, but the work that exposes the institution. The building, laid bare, becomes the subject of its own revelation.
- Type: Performative Installation.
- Location: Centre Pompidou Museum, Galerie 1.
- Performer: Stéphane Malka
- Area: 2000m²
