Centre Pompidou plans to go global: focus is China, India, Brazil
The Centre Pompidou is looking to expand abroad with a chain of galleries that will carry the flagship French institution’s brand. Alain Seban, the president of the Centre Pompidou, says that museums, universities and even shopping malls could host exhibitions of items drawn from the Paris-based institution’s 72,000-strong collection of modern and contemporary art. Seban says. “With temporary projects in existing venues like museums [and] universities, but why not historical monuments, former industrial facilities or shopping malls?”
He would not be drawn on exact locations abroad but indicates that he is targeting Bric (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries with growing economies—and art scenes. “This is a strategy for expanding internationally into territories that can aim to create their own contemporary art brands. Countries such as China, India and Brazil, for instance, can develop such brands in the future.”
This is not the first time the Pompidou has tried to branch out overseas. In 2007, the then president Bruno Racine said he expected a museum carrying the Pompidou’s name to open in Shanghai before 2010. But the scheme never materialised because of difficult negotiations with the Chinese authorities: the main obstacle was the lack of a legal framework for a non-profit foreign institution to operate in China. A joint attempt by the Guggenheim and the Centre Pompidou, in conjunction with the developer Dynamic Star International, to operate the planned cultural facilities in the West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong by 2018 was also thwarted.
Arguably the real revolution is taking place online, with Seban saying that the Virtual Centre Pompidou, due to go live later this year, will differ from other museum websites in that it adopts “a content-driven approach. Any content produced by the Centre Pompidou, from catalogues to interviews with artists and curators, will be transferred automatically onto our new web platform, which will act as a digital mirror to the Centre Pompidou.”
To see the original article : The Art Newspaper