Since its earliest acquisitions, the Francès collection has given a central place to critical and discursive artworks: those that examine abuses of power structures, denounce social and economic excesses, and shed light on the fragilities of modern democracies. Many of these works reveal a logic of engagement, struggle, or resistance.

Tout est politique ! The Fondation Francès presents a manifesto exhibition in which art explores the tensions of our world. From Sheng Qi to Spencer Tunick, and from Subodh Gupta to Michael Ray Charles, more than thirty international artists offer an unflinching gaze on power, commitment, and freedom. Installations, paintings, photographs, and performances draw an incisive panorama of contemporary struggles and multiple forms of resistance.

Tout est politique ! This cry, once shouted in the streets, re-emerges here as an invitation, a refusal of indifference, and a call for vigilance. Each artwork becomes a statement, a rupture in the established order; placed before us, it disturbs, questions, resists.

Tout est politique ! An emblematic slogan of May ’68 and the protest movements of the 1960s–70s, it resonates today within Fondation Francès as a still-living assertion. This ambivalent title questions the omnipresence of politics in our lives, bodies, identities, actions, and more broadly in every social fact, every production, every relationship. In the context of a contemporary art exhibition, this statement—while open to nuance—becomes a critical tool to examine the complex, sometimes conflictual relationship between art and politics.

Tout est politique ! Rather than assigning artworks an immediate activist function, the exhibition invites us to consider how they engage with social and historical contexts to reveal a political dimension that lies less in their form than in the viewer’s gaze.