Pleasing the Spirits

Curators : Séverine Fromaigeat & Paul Maheke

Pleasing the Spirits takes the visitor on a journey through the Barbier-Mueller Collection, an extraordinary set of artefacts from across the world. This project is devised in close dialogue with artist Paul Maheke, whose work, centred on dance and performance, explores the potential of the body as a vector for memory and history.

The Barbier-Mueller Collection, numbering several thousand pieces, forms a living, moving organism, a multicultural body within which the nature and meaning of an object shift according to its position within the community of artworks, depending on its proximity and collision with other objects.

Pleasing the Spirits offers a pathway alongside these objects. Seats embrace us, masks scrutinise us, a dense forest of spears and shields rises before us, while the ceremonial objects embody joy and exaltation. Together, they unfold throughout the rooms, like territories to be explored, like an emerging memory. This memory is the words of the elders, the sound of the dances and rituals, the whisper of entranced objects, rustling between the stone walls of the museum. The spirits of this place—whether ancestors, shamans, artists, creators or collectors—shaped the collection, giving it its soul and its colour. 

In a setting that plays with the presence of the body in space, with the sensory and physical experience of wandering, this new exhibition concept seeks to rethink our relationship with museum objects. These artworks, with their wide variety of forms and uses, brought together with great freedom, unveil a transfigured symbolic power and aura, proposing a taxonomy that escapes the categories of art histories. An invitation takes shape throughout this journey, an invitation to dance, to sense, to feel—with the spirits, the forms, the memories—to invent together new cosmogonies and new futures. An invitation to gain a different understanding of the worlds we live in.  

The artist
Paul Maheke (1985, Brive-la-Gaillarde, France) has developed a multifaceted artistic practice that combines performance, drawing, video, sound and dance. His work explores the way in which bodies, narratives and presences appear or elude representation. Shifting the norms of the visible with his works, Paul Maheke summons spectral figures, poetic voices, and immaterial elements to open up other forms of perception. Each project creates a fluid space, traversed by esoteric, spiritual, and sometimes mystical references. The artist thus constructs a body of work in which the intimate is linked to the collective and bodies draw new narratives. A current resident at the Villa Medici in Rome (2025-2026), he has presented his work in institutions such as the Tate Modern (London), the Centre Pompidou (Paris), the High Line (New York) and the Fondazione Pomodoro (Milan).

The publication
An eponymous catalogue accompanies the exhibition: its design, inspired by the museum's historical catalogues, extends the tribute to the museum's collection and history presented in Pleasing the Spirits. Published in French and English, it features an introduction by Séverine Fromaigeat, director of the museum, a conversation between the curators, a poetic essay by Quinn Latimer, and artworks descriptions.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum
Located in the heart of Geneva's Old Town, the Barbier-Mueller Museum preserves, exhibits and studies a collection of art objects of immense variety. Today, it has several thousand works ranging from antiquity to the present day and includes objects from all continents. Twice a year, the Barbier-Mueller Museum offers new presentations of its collection and temporary exhibitions. It regularly invites contemporary artists to reflect on the pieces in the collection and rethink the layout of the rooms, thereby renewing our experience and our understanding of the works on display.

Media contact
Keilen Euzet: keuzet@barbier-mueller.ch