What Does It Mean to Be European?

A show at Fondation Cartier, Paris, brings together works by young artists from across the continent

Europe is in crisis. Right-wing populisms are on the rise and have been for some time now. As the European Union’s once triumphant liberal hegemony sputters under the weight of its own contradictions, politicians such as Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini have seized on a generalized feeling of precariousness to address a more libidinal obsession with national identity, defined in opposition to the non-European other.

But, what does it mean to be European? This culturally and politically weighty question is posed by the exhibition ‘Jeunes Artistes en Europe. Les Métamorphoses’ (Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now), on view in Paris at the Fondation Cartier. The show brings together works by 21 artists from 16 countries, all born between 1980 and 1994, but not necessarily in the European Union. ‘Europe was our framework,’ curator Thomas Delamarre tells me during an interview. ‘We wanted to show artists who were living and working here, but we were not looking for works on the subject of Europe; we didn’t want to organize an exhibition that examined the “European question”.’ 

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