October 21–26, 2025
OFFSCREEN Paris is delighted to announce the return of the Maison OFFSCREEN Curatorial Residency Program during this year’s edition, October 21-26, 2025. A highlight of Paris Art Week, OFFSCREEN Paris exhibits avant-garde, historical, and contemporary artists, working with installations and experimental practices around image-based work.
Once again, 24 international institutional curators working with image based practices will gather over several days, nourishing the connections within our community of experts that relate to OFFSCREEN’s voice from across museum departments. Residents attend closed door working sessions, engage with OFFSCREEN artists in the exhibition and participate in the programming throughout the week.
The moderators for this year’s program are Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art and co-curator of the upcoming 2026 Whitney Biennial, and Margit Rosen, Head of Collections, Archives & Research at ZKM / Centre for Art and Media.
Both Rosen and Sawyer participated in the inaugural edition of the residency program last year, which gathered curators from institutions including Tate, MoCA LA, Serpentine, Dia, Haus der Kunst in Munich, M+ and others.
Maison OFFSCREEN’s First Curatorial Research Grant Has Been Awarded to Robyn Farrell
Robyn Farrell, Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at The Kitchen in New York, and a 2024 participant in the residency, was awarded the Maison OFFSCREEN Curatorial Research Grant 2024 to pursue research into the Kitchen’s archive around Nam June Paik’s televised performances between Paris and New York.
In 1984, Nam June Paik devised a counterpoint to his global event, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a live television broadcast with graphics designed by Paik alongside streamed video footage, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell featured performances by Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and many more, broadcasting from New York, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul to an audience of over twenty-five million viewers. The event, which occurred on New Year’s Day of 1984, discredited the George Orwell novel 1984’s pejorative view of technology by portraying television and mass media as agents of art and the avant-garde rather than as tools of totalitarianism. The Kitchen presentation of 1984 in 1984 included a two-channel installation of the New York and Paris tapes from Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, and was on view from January 5–28, 1984. In the early weeks of the showing, Paik gave several lectures and performances to accompany the work. Sixteen years later The Kitchen and the Downtown Arts Festival presented a sample from Les Spectacles Vivants, a series of performances curated by Serge Laurent of the Pompidou Center in Paris in 2000. The performance group Grand Magasin and soloists Xavier Le Roy, Claudia Trozzi, and David Shea performed work demonstrating new trends in French contemporary performance art.
Farrell’s project, titled Some Spectacle or Satellite draws from her ongoing research into televisual and video art, performance, and mass broadcast. Anchored in The Kitchen’s legacy of radical, interdisciplinary experimentation and its history of collaborative work with Paris-based artists and institutions, this initiative brings together newly commissioned and historical works in a dynamic, cross-cultural exchange.
At its core, Some Spectacle or Satellite explores ideas of transmission, migration, and displacement—across both media and geography. With its distinct platform and deep roots in Paris’ contemporary art landscape, OFFSCREEN plays a key role as a creative and civic partner.
One of New York City’s oldest nonprofit alternative art centers, The Kitchen is dedicated to offering artists opportunities to create and present new work within, and across, the disciplines of dance, film, literature, music, theater, video, and visual art. The institution fosters a community of artists and audiences, offering artists the opportunity to create—and for audiences to engage with—work that pushes the boundaries of artistic disciplines and strengthens meaningful dialogues between the arts and larger culture.
The Kitchen was founded as an artist collective in 1971, by Woody and Steina Vasulka, and was formalized as a 501c3 in 1973. It has, from its infancy, been a space where experimental artists share progressive ideas with like-minded colleagues. It was among the very first American institutions to embrace the emerging fields of video and performance, while presenting visionary new work in established disciplines such as dance, music, literature, and film. This unique combination generated an environment immediately conducive to groundbreaking and cross-disciplinary exploration, helping to launch the careers of many artists who have defined the global avant-garde.
This initiative is a reflection of The Kitchen’s “Without Walls” program, which reimagines institutional boundaries and centers collaboration as a foundational practice. Through this exchange between New York and Paris, we reaffirm a mutual commitment to experimental, artist-driven work and the porous exchange of ideas that has long defined our shared histories.
About OFFSCREEN
OFFSCREEN Paris is a nomadic event that values contemporary, historic and avant-garde artists with experimental image-based practices. With its distinct voice, it is a must-see highlight of Paris Art Week each October, bringing together a tightly curated selection of artists working with installations, still and moving images. A commercial, site-specific architectural exhibition, since its founding in 2022 by Artistic Director Julien Frydman, OFFSCREEN has become an important nexus for building the contemporary conversation, institutional support and the market in this field.
For its 4th edition, from October 21 to 26, OFFSCREEN Paris will take over a new venue: La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière. Once a renowned home to site specific interventions in the 1980s and 90s, with installations by Anselm Kiefer, Bob Wilson and Lucinda Childs, Bill Viola, Nan Goldin, Christian Boltanski and others, and performances within Festival d’Automne, La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpêtrière has been largely forgotten in the current cultural sphere. Following its two remarkable former venues, Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild and Grand Garage Haussmann, OFFSCREEN is happy to reintroduce the space during this pivotal moment in the art calendar.
