Paris (AFP)

Stocks of bright blue gas cylinders, shell casings as vases: with bitter irony, artists, mainly from the Middle East, see "our world burning", in an exhibition presented at the Palais de Tokyo in collaboration with MATHAF, the Qatar museum.

Abdellah Karroum, of Moroccan nationality and director of this Arab Museum of modern and contemporary art, is the co-curator of the exhibition with the French Fabien Danesi. This museum, which has ten years of existence, brings together some 9,000 works mainly from the private collection of Sheikh Hassan Bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani.

With artists mainly from the Middle East, "Our world is burning" is the first part, until May 17, of a diptych of exhibitions, "Fragmenting the world". The second part will be "Ubuntu, a lucid dream" from June to September, with artists from Africa.

These are the first two exhibitions of Emma Lavigne, who directed the Center Pompidou-Metz and was appointed head of the Parisian temple of contemporary art after the departure of its former president Jean de Loisy from the Ecole des Beaux- Arts.

The "Our world is burning" project, at the start of the Qatar-France cultural year, was criticized by LGBT circles because of the repression of homosexuality in Qatar.

But Ms. Lavigne insists on cooperation between museums, and on the great open-mindedness, including on these delicate themes in the Arab world, of the young Moroccan commissioner Abdellah Karroum.

- Democratic fire -

In the exhibition, the artists denounce, with all possible languages, the people and nature violated by wars and pollution - soaring oil wells, forests in Morocco and elsewhere -, but also celebrate the fire symbolizing democratic impulse of the "Arab Spring".

It is when "the world is fragmented" that "it is possible to recompose it", judge Emma Lavigne.

"The Middle East and Africa (in" Ubuntu ") allow us to get out of purely Western representations," she underlines.

In the basement, a vast recomposed landscape of the Egyptian Wael Shawky leads into the dunes and the ruins of the desert, in the footsteps of historical and dreamlike tales, told by children wearing false mustaches.

The Qatari Faraj Daham, with "Street language", pays tribute to immigrant workers, half-masked faces, from the Doha construction sites. And canvases by Egyptian Inji Efflatoun, deceased Marxist and feminist painter, deliver portraits of activist women.

Impressive are the photographs, by Iranian Shirin Neshat, of the faces of men and women confronted with the loss of a loved one during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Tiny inscriptions in Persian appear on the wrinkled figures.

Evidence of the Syrian conflict, the Franco-Syrian Bady Dalloul produced 200 miniature drawings in matchboxes.

"The silent multitudes", an installation by the deceased Egyptian artist Amal Kenawy, stacks up gas cylinders, while Sammy Balojl, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has 41 shiny sockets containing indoor plants.

- Theatrical poetry -

As if to console these cries of revolt, the German artist Ulla von Brandenburg delivers in a parallel exhibition at the entrance of the Palace a much more playful and poetic work around the theme of theater open to nature.

In the middle of large drapes, which separate spaces devoted to the different moments and rituals of life, installations and scattered objects recall strong feelings of childhood: an enormous haystack, ropes, nets, dolls, dolls, mats, fishing rods, torn or washed fabrics ...

The moving space in these envelopes of fabrics never stops changing. Projections of a film shot underwater show drifting objects and clothes. Dancers are regularly invited to perform in the midst of this evolving theater.

© 2020 AFP