Céleste Boursier-Mougenot
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in Nice in 1961.
He lives and works in Sète.
It all began with a love of music, first at the conservatory, then with the discovery of punk rock and experimentation with friends studying at art school: a period that profoundly influenced the artist's rigorous quest for freedom. For the next ten years, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot worked as a composer for the theater, honing his perception and sensitivity to movement, displacement, and the relationship between performance and the audience. Then came the time for his first installations, where the elements—water, wind, waves, electricity—combined with technical equipment, formed the soundscapes in which the visitor, simply by being present, became an active participant.
His years in New York (he was a laureate of the International Studio Program PS1) grounded his practice in the creation of musical pieces that he considers compositions, notably his two signature works and their numerous versions (more than 25 each), which have become from here to ear and clinamen. In the first, he invites the visitor into "bird territory" in an aviary where electric guitars are transformed into perches for the zebra finches that inhabit it. In the second, white porcelain bowls float and meet under the influence of a gentle current in bluish basins, tinkle and plunge the visitor into a reverie that momentarily transports them.
The artist also domesticates fierce audio or video feedback using microphones and video cameras suspended from helium balloons that, carried by the wind, drift through the exhibition space (scanner 2006, transcom 2010). He equips a dozen silent vacuum cleaners with small blues harmonicas (harmonichaos, 2000) and summons a rain of cherry pits (averse, 2017) which, day after day, covers a drum kit according to the fluctuation of detected microwaves. He conceives original soundscapes that often adhere to the principles of inverted perspective, misunderstanding, and all sorts of other poetic aberrations. The relationship to the monumental in his fluid installations with the buildings that house them features amply in his work when he is invited to take over an entire space: galleries and art centers since 1995, the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and Palais de Tokyo in 2015, the Minsheng Museum Shanghai in 2017, the François Schneider Foundation in 2019, the Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection in 2025, the Park Avenue Armory New York in 2026…
