Consortium Museum - Centre d'art contemporain

Housed since 2011 in a building specially designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, the story of this special institution began in 1977 on the first floor of an alternative bookshop, then in a former shop at the back of the courtyard on the Place du Marché in Dijon city centre.
Its founders, Xavier Douroux and Franck Gautherot, along with a handful of enthusiasts, organised exhibitions with avant-garde artists from the late 1970s onwards: Christian Boltanski in 1978, Hans Peter Feldmann in 1979, Annette Messager in 1980, Cindy Sherman and Daniel Buren in 1982, Carl Andre and Richard Prince in 1983, Bertrand Lavier and Hans Haacke in 1986...

From the late 1980s onwards, Le Consortium questioned the nature and conventions of the exhibition by means of the exhibition itself, organising with "Une Autre Affaire" an "exhibition of exhibitions" re-enacting in almost real time, in Dijon, the Group Shows organised in the United States by Peter Halley, Bob Nickas or Steven Parrino; also organising, with "Le Choix des Femmes" in 1990, an exhibition that led 4 male curators to invite 4 women artists each.

After exhibiting minimal and conceptual art in the 1980s, the Pictures Generation and the abstract experiments that followed on from the Neo-Geo movement, in the 1990s Le Consortium supported the emergence of a new generation of artists: from Young British Artists - Liam Gillick, Angela Bulloch and Gillian Wearing - to Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Maurizio Cattelan, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Ugo Rondinone, Jorge Pardo and Philippe Parreno.

Recently hailed by the New York Times as "The under-the-radar French museum that quietly predicts art's next big thing", Le Consortium has, since the 2000s, organised the first exhibitions in France of a number of American artists - Christopher Wool, Kelley Walker, Rachel Feinstein, Josh Smith, Rachel Harrison, Wade Guyton, Joe Bradley, Roe Ethridge, Brian Calvin, Alex Israel, Oscar Tuazon, Lari Pittman - while also devoting retrospective exhibitions to the work of Lynda Benglis, Dadamaino, Luigi Ontani and Phillip King.

Curator of the French pavilion that won Pierre Huyghe a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, then of the 7th Lyon Biennale in 2003 ("C'est arrivé demain"), Le Consortium played a part in the "rediscovery" of the work of Yayoi Kusama, devoting a major retrospective to her in 2000, which was then shown at the Maison du Japon in Paris before travelling to Denmark, Austria and Korea, and also organising exhibitions in Anyang, Seoul... And at the Centre Georges Pompidou when his collection was presented there.

Alongside the Fondation de France, Le Consortium is a mediator for the "Nouveaux Commanditaires" initiative, which offers citizens united around a common cause the chance to commission an artist to express that concern. Numerous projects have been carried out in this way, leading Oscar Tuazon, for example, to create a monumental work in Belfort as a tribute to the African Commandos, and Christopher Wool to design a new set of stained glass windows for the priory church of La Charité-sur-Loire, in Burgundy. Taking part in the ambition to have the Climats du vignoble de Bourgogne classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in 2012 Le Consortium developed a project with the Domaine de la Romanée Conti to transform the former winery of the Princes de Conti into an exhibition space devoted to contemporary art, and has since organised exhibitions there by Bertrand Lavier, John M. Armleder, Thomas Houseago, Yan Pei Ming, Kim Gordon, Rodney Graham and others.

The fact that the Consortium's founders, joined in 1995 by Éric Troncy, remained artistic directors for 40 years (offering a model of permanence for a public structure devoted to contemporary art that is unrivalled anywhere else in the world) has made it possible to establish an uninterrupted dialogue with the artists, often continuing throughout their careers, making the Consortium a demanding laboratory and a place for aesthetic debate, with the exhibition as its language. Since 2000, three associate curators have joined Le Consortium: Seungduk Kim, Stéphanie Moisdon and Anne Pontégnie.