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When Forms Come to Life: Collaborating to Build a World
Meet & Greet
Lafayette Anticipations9 rue du Platre 75004 PARIS Through Life of Forms, art and design respond to one another, influence each other, and blur their boundaries. The curators explore this interplay between disciplines, the connections that emerge between works from the Lafayette Anticipations Collection and creations from AlUla’s design programs, and how these objects continue to evolve according to their uses, contexts, and the perspectives they inspire.
The exhibition’s title echoes the book by art historian Henri Focillon, Life of Forms (1934), in which he argues that art and architecture “collaborate in the creation of a world.”
On the occasion of this event, Clément Delépine, director of Lafayette Anticipations and co-curator of the exhibition, Arnaud Morand, Head of Arts and Creative Industries at AfalUla and co-curator of the exhibition, as well as Ali Alghazzawi, Head of the Artist-in-Residence Program at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and associate curator, discuss the criteria that guided the dialogue between works from AlUla’s residency programs and pieces from the Lafayette Anticipations Collection — Moulin Family Endowment Fund.
They are joined by designers Ori Orisun Merhav and Mehdi Kebaier (ALTIN Studio), both of whom are alumni of the AlUla 2025 design residency program, to discuss how works such as Harrat by Studio ThusThat, Palm Chronicles by ALTIN, and Die Bibliothek I by Katinka Bock conceive of matter as a repertoire of gestures and sedimented histories. Together, they explore the connections between contemporary art and design, viewed here as two sister disciplines.
Talk moderated by Formae.