MAC/VAL – Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne

I’ve wanted to take a look at the MAC/VAL gallery for a long time but was put off by the trek out to the suburbs. Apparently many people feel the same, as despite free entry offered by a Paris listings magazine that weekend, the gallery was almost empty. I was only one of four going along for the guided tour. You’ll be happy to know it was definitely worth the trip.

The visit to Vitry-sur-Seine is a bit of an eye-opener. Paris is a bubble defended by ‘Le Périphérique’, the huge motorway that circles it. The suburbs outside consist of pockets of either beautiful countryside or badly-designed tower blocks of council-owned apartments that make you feel depressed just looking at them.

I find this weird after living in London, which I loved for its complete mixture of people from all walks of life. Where I used to live in South London, there were politician’s second homes on one side of the road and council estates with teenage gun crime on the other.

The bubble of Paris means that when you get off the train on the other side of Le Périphérique you may as well have got in and out of a tardis. It’s a completely different world.

After living in Paris for a year and a half I consider myself able to blend in the crowd. I know this is true because French people ask me for directions everyday, or should I say, everyday I get people lost. When I arrived in the neighbourhood of Vitry-sur-Seine, all of a sudden I looked like a tourist, an invader from the big city.

Following the initial culture shock we headed through the town centre to find the bus. This was an alien concept for me. I love bus journeys but in Paris the Métro is so good there’s no point in getting the bus, it’s even the same price. On the way to the bus stop there is an unplanned free exhibition of street art. Some official, but the most impressive was the unofficial, delicately drawn paste-ups and pastel murals. In the centre of Paris there is a lot of graffiti, but most of the time people can only get away with a quick tag before they get caught. In the overlooked suburban towns there is more time for creativity, which is lucky as this grey town needs brightening up.

Arriving at the MAC/VAL gallery was like checking into a space colony. It’s a huge building with a peaceful sculpture garden at the back. Hungry and tired from the overwhelming journey we tried out the gallery’s restaurant. It made the over-priced salads and lemon cake that you find in most galleries look like McDonalds and was really good value for money.

As well as the amusing temporary exhibition of video and performance by Éric Duyckaerts, the gallery has a permanent collection that includes many of France’s most-loved contemporary artists such as Christian Boltanski, Pierre Soulages and Annette Messager. It’s a thoughtful collection reflecting the gallery’s surroundings with themes of urban development, multi-culturalism, migration and family.

My favourite piece was actually a collection of robotic sculptures by Malachi Farrell that imitated electrocution torture, but I’m not in the mood to write about such deep, political subjects today, so instead I’ve decided to show you these clever circles.

This is one of the first pieces of art you see in the gallery. It’s called Trois Cercles Désaxés and was created in 2005 by Felice Varini. If I hadn’t taken a guided tour I’d have thought it was just a load of random lines, but from one single point in the room it all comes together and the lines form three circles. Magical.

As you leave the gallery you notice there’s a giant neon sign displaying the words, ‘Please come back’. Don’t worry MAC/VAL, I won’t be long!

“The Imaginary Historian”