[Summer 2026]
Marie J. Jean
An interview by Jérôme Delgado
[EXCERPT]
VOX, centre de l’image contemporaine celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2025. Rather than looking back at the institution’s history, the team decided to mark the occasion with an exhibition, 1985. Image-Worlds, and an eponymous publication aimed at probing the impact of the 1980s on today’s world. In this interview, Marie J. Jean, executive and artistic director of VOX, talks about the ideas and issues behind the concept of the book, which was published in fall 2025.
jérôme delgado: The book 1985. Image-Worlds is more than 350 pages long, but what’s even more surprising than its length is its content. What guided your choices?
marie j. jean: We decided that we wanted to pursue a resolutely transversal approach, which we thought of as a way to displace the usual analytic frameworks for the images by relating them to the discourses that accompanied them, the sociocultural conditions under which they were produced, and the narratives that they helped to shape. So, the idea wasn’t to offer a synthesis of image practices but to bring out the resonances – and sometimes the tensions – between images and other cultural fields, which are too often addressed in isolation.
We include perspectives that are both multidisciplinary and complementary, ranging from film to the ecosystem of art, via studies on night, the environment, the history of exhibitions, fashion, photography, technological transformations, and more. The diversity of voices – art historians, artists, exhibition curators, writers, researchers, even an archivist and a politician – conveys my belief that the history of the 1980s cannot be apprehended except through a plurality of points of view, both cultural and generational.
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[ Numéro complet, en version papier et numérique, disponible ici : Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ L’article complet en version numérique est disponible ici : TITRE ARTICLE]
Freelance journalist Jérôme Delgado is the publishing coordinator at Ciel variable.