Une compilation des contributions à la Triennale 2012, une manifestation majeure de photographie contemporaine : El Anatsui, Lothar Baumgarten, Yto Barrada, Monica Bonvicini, Geta Bratescu, daniel Buren, Thomas Hirschhorn, Isaac Julien, Annette Messager, Wangechi Mutu, Eva Partum, Thomas Struth, etc. ©Electre 2025

Occasioned by La Triennale 2012, a major exhibition of contemporary visual art, film, photography, and performance occurring at the Palais de Tokyo and other Paris-based institutions, Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far is a comprehensive volume of essays including a series of seminal writings by thinkers exploring the connections between artistic practice and the writing of culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Edited by Okwui Enwezor with Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émilie Renard, and Claire Staebler, this volume features new contributions by curators, critics, and theorists of contemporary art, culture, and politics - including Maxime Cervulle, James Clifford, Simon Njami, Nadia Tazi, Françoise Vergès, and Elvan Zabunyan. In addition to a series of newly commissioned essays, the anthology comprises twenty-six texts spanning the period between 1928-2009, some of which have been translated and made widely available for the first time.

Beginning with Marcel Mauss, Michel Leiris, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this anthology takes as its main point of departure the critical legacy of early twentieth-century ethnographic writing. A series of subsequent voices - framed as debates and conversations - offer critiques and reevaluations of the foundations of modern anthropology, exploring its resonance with artistic and curatorial practice, literature, post-colonial theory, and cultural theory. Authors include Aimé Césaire, Jacques Derrida, Manthia Diawara, Johannes Fabian, Hal Foster, Abdelkébir Khatibi, and Thomas McEvilley, among others.

The volume also features over 200 illustrations, including full-color visual essays by each of the exhibition contributors, with newly-commissioned works from El Anatsui, Lothar Baumgarten, Yto Barrada, Monica Bonvicini, Geta Bratescu, Daniel Buren, Thomas Hirschhorn, Isaac Julien, Annette Messager, Wangechi Mutu, Eva Partum, and Thomas Struth, among many others.

This book offers readers the singular opportunity to explore the broad landscape of human interaction, in words and in images, from the most remote cultures of the world to those who live with and around us.