Curated by Anne Dressen with Michèle Heuzé and Benjamin Lignel

This exhibition might be the most ambitious project dealing with jewelry ever conceived for a museum. The titular reference to taboos relays that while gems may be popular within institutions of applied arts, they are historically not welcome in fine-art contexts (too marginal, craft-oriented, precious, or ornamental). Transcending chronological and geographic categorizations, the curators will bring together more than four hundred pieces of jewelry to be displayed around four themes—identity, value, body, and ritual. The selection will include objects ranging from prehistorical adornments to iconic artifacts of contemporary pop culture (Michael Jackson’s glove will be on view), as well as bijoux d’artistes by everyone from Anni Albers to Danny McDonald. Visitors will rediscover design from Lalique and Tony Duquette alongside high-end jewelers like Cartier and Bucellati. A catalogue will accompany the show, with essays by historians and theoreticians Arlette Farge and Glenn Adamson, among others.

— Nicolas Trembley

Curated by Marta Gili and Marie Bertran

Tunisian-born Ismaïl Bahri’s’s forthcoming exhibition, titled “Instruments,” seems a logical successor to “Uprisings,” curated by Georges Didi-Huberman and on view at the Jeu de Paume this past fall. The latter included Bahri’s Film à blanc, 2012, in which a blank sheet covers most of three adjacent screens. Only the movement of air across the sheet allows glimpses of what is happening behind, which is more audible than visible. This work exemplifies Bahri’s style, often characterized by a formal homology between the material support and the image—a structural yet mobile tension that is the result of the internal limits of representation, the interaction between sound and sight, and the vagaries of perception. Devoted to Bahri’s video works, this show will testify to the coherence and equipoise with which he applies this rigorously calibrated sensibility to political conflicts and social injustices.

— Nicole Brenez