Opening on Thursday, November 12, from 6 pm to 9 pm.
from November 13th to 15th : 2 pm-7pm
The Silent Watchers
The Silent Watchers
"Within the walls of La Louisiane, time holds the imprint of passing bodies and the memory of creative insomnia. From Beat Generation manuscripts to Miles Davis solos, this hotel on Rue de Seine was long a refuge for rebellious spirits - a true Parisian counterpart to the Chelsea Hotel, where the margins become a territory of survival. For Photo Saint-Germain, nine rooms open their doors to fictions of shadow. The exhibition transforms the hotel into a liberated territory, a poetic refuge where desire, night, and the refusal of norms enter into dialogue.
Through photographs and films made by nine artists spanning the 1960s to today, the works reveal the brilliance of subcultures, kept secrets, and stolen fragments of life. Weaving together intimate archives and contemporary visions, the exhibition gives new form to forgotten paths and hidden lives. The hotel room ceases to be a mere shelter and becomes instead a sanctuary of vulnerability and of intimate geographies."
Martha Kirszenbaum
Tom Wood
From 1979 to 1986, Tom Wood immersed himself in the nocturnal fauna of the Chelsea Reach club near Liverpool. His intimate pictures capture the effervescence of bodies on the dancefloor as much as the suspension of silences: desires on hold, fleeting gestures, the tenderness and solitude of the small hours. Presented at La Louisiane, these previously unseen archives unveil the rituals of a rebellious, festive youth, turning a place of passage into a territory inhabited by its most beautiful shadows.
Chantal Akerman
In her 1972 film Hotel Monterey, Chantal Akerman probes urban solitude through the silent wandering of her camera in a New York hotel. From the lobby to the roof, fluorescent corridors, elevators and spectral figures compose a poetic meditation on waiting and anonymity. Echoing La Louisiane, the film turns the transient shelter into a haunted territory where time expands, revealing the melancholy beauty of clandestine lives and invisible presences.
Alassan Diawara
In Les Candidates, Alassan Diawara reactivates a collection of archival footage shot at a West African diaspora beauty pageant in Belgium. Far from the spectacle, his gaze lingers on bodies, attitudes, moments of waiting and on what their presence produces in the space. The women stage themselves on their own terms: diasporic figures who, on the margins of dominant gazes, invent their own visibility and turn memory into an act of poetic resistance.
Tohé Commaret
At the crossroads of experimental cinema and documentary, Tohé Commaret films places of passage where the intimate and the political merge. In Rosa, a red puddle opens and closes the film, a threshold between life and death. An impersonal banquet hall and unsettling topographies bear the spectral imprint of history and the anguish of belonging nowhere. Between image and sound, memory and fluid identities unfold: in these liminal, suspended spaces, women's desire and interiority find refuge.
Linda Zgengová
Basing her research on sexual and spiritual transformations, Linda Zhengová explores the places where reason collapses. Orbiting around the eroticisms of the body, the heart and the sacred so dear to Bataille, she perceives madness not as a pathology but as access to freedom. Her images capture the aura of a self dissolving between ecstasy and hell. The room thus becomes a psychic sanctuary, an intimate cartography oscillating between turmoil and empathy.
Jill Westwood
A radical figure of the London undergrounds of the 1980s, Jill Westwood explores art as a territory of liberated life. Within the intimacy of the domestic setting, her self-portraits and power outages stage a dominant femininity, dressed in latex and armed with a sovereign gaze. Subversive and theatrical, her works question desire, BDSM dynamics and the reappropriation of bodies. The room becomes the secret theater where vulnerability is inverted and an erotics of refusal is invented.
Karol Radziszewski
Blending Polaroids, phone snapshots and intimate archives, Karol Radziszewski documents the encounters and parties that pass through his Warsaw apartment. Whether friends, lovers or models, the photographed figures blur the nature of relationships and dissolve the boundary between private and public. By reconstructing this domestic space at La Louisiane, the work embraces the ambivalence of the hotel: a transitory refuge where the memory of queer, rebellious lives vibrates.
Michella Bredahl
Between vulnerability and compassion, Michella Bredahl captures the raw intimacy of her loved ones in unguarded moments. Extending a family thread marked by the shadow of addiction, her portraits reinvent femininity as a fluid and plural experience. By reversing the reclining pose, a historical motif she reappropriates, the artist turns the memory of suffering into a space of reclamation. The bodies reveal themselves as accomplices, offering a sanctuary of tenderness and resilience.
Michel Auder
A privileged witness of the New York underground scene from 1969, Michel Auder captured life at the Chelsea Hotel, where he was then living with the actress Viva Superstar. Through intimate video fragments, his film paints a raw portrait of Andy Warhol and his creative menagerie. Echoing the legendary American hotel, the work resonates here with the memory of La Louisiane: two twin refuges where artistic margins, insomnias and the art of clandestine living stand as a territory of absolute freedom.
Hôtel La Louisiane
Amid a haven of chaos, freedom, wild and yet precious chatter, the Hôtel La Louisiane built its identity at 60 rue de Seine, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Since the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine, artists, creators, and travelers in search of wonder have stayed there, whether for a brief visit or a longer residency - among those who once lived there: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Juliette Gréco, Lucian Freud, Albertine Sarrazin, Syd Barrett, Keith Haring, Quentin Tarantino, and other contemporary figures to whom the Hôtel La Louisiane owes its discretion.
