February 7–November 15, 2026
Marseille 13002
France
Hours: Wednesday–Saturday 12–6pm
Sunday 2–6pm
The Ecology of Relationships—The Forest Is the Lover of the Sea
Artists: Keita Mori, Yoko Ono, Lieko Shiga, Mieko Shiomi, Atsuko Tanaka, Hideki Umezawa, Chikako Yamashiro, Shingo Yoshida, Gōzō Yoshimasu, Hiroshi Yoshimura
Curated by Élodie Royer.
February 7–November 15, 2026
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain: The Field of Stars
Curated by Muriel Enjalran
February 7–November 15, 2026
A new programming year opens at Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain with the launch of its in-house exhibition season, placed under the sign of an ecology of relationships grounded in heightened attention to the living world and our environments.
The two exhibitions, The Ecology of Relationships—The Forest Is the Lover of the Sea and The Field of Stars, invite us to decenter ourselves in order to reconnect more fully with the world.
From ecosophical and cosmogonic perspectives, the invited artists—coming from diverse cultures and backgrounds—seek through their works to generate new forms of interaction between human and non-human entities. Through an act of contemplation, they encourage us to reconsider our relationship to nature and the universe, to question our inherited hierarchies, and to embrace the richness and mystery of diversity.
Through an unprecedented dialogue between Japanese artists from different generations, The Ecology of Relationships—The Forest Is the Lover of the Sea makes tangible the affective, ecological, and historical bonds that tie us to our living environments.
Taking as its point of departure the triple disaster of March 11, 2011, that hit North East Japan, an event with far-reaching intimate, social, and environmental consequences, the exhibition presents works that emerged in this “post-Fukushima” context alongside 1970s practices seeped in the history and rapid modernisation of Japan.
Within a display that echoes the Frac Sud’s architecture by Kengo Kuma, the exhibition explores how the events of 2011 and the artistic practices that appeared in their aftermath, relay something of those that emerged in Japan during the second half of the twentieth century.
By engaging directly with ecosystems that come together and come undone, these artists share a common approach and love for adventurous artworks that embrace both collaboration and conflict. Moreover, they refuse to look away from the importance of these relationships that connect us, both to the living world and to one another. In other words echoing the exhibition’s subtitle “The Forest Is the Lover of the Sea”, taken from the environmental tale by Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, they are artists who have chosen a certain ecology of relationships.
Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain have explored how the world manifests itself to us and how we represent it. Drawing on their combined expertise, they create alphabets in multiple forms to offer renewed perspectives on our environment, on time, and on space, through a unique linguistic and artistic approach. The duo employs a wide range of media—sculptures, paintings, videos, sound, and animated installations—to create minimalist yet poetic works.
The Field of Stars at Frac Sud presents a landmark installation developed following the Flowering of Light exhibition for the 2024 Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Centre Pompidou. Frac Sud hosts the Marcel Duchamp Prize artworks, placing them in dialogue with other pieces exploring the stars and the creation of the universe. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey through the cosmos, leading us into a realm of stars and flowers connected to the sun and moon through trails of light that trace back across the ages of creation. Their works weave together science and mythology in recounting how the stars, planets, and the Earth itself came into being—a journey that invites us to look to the skies while becoming more present in our world.
The Ecology of Relationships
Supported by the Japan Foundation and La Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris
The Field of Stars
Supported by the Instituto Guimarães Rosa and the Brazilian Embassy in Paris,
In partnership with Galerie Martine Aboucaya.
