“Duo Infernal_,_”the first solo show in France for the French-born, London-based artist Caroline Achaintre, included woolen wall hangings, glazed ceramic sculptures, and psychedelic watercolors set against pink-accented walls. Borrowed from a 1982 song by the German punk band Extrabreit and Marianne Rosenberg, the exhibition’s title served as a reminder of the essential role that duality plays in Achaintre’s oeuvre. The artist’s consistently contradictory works appear at once functional and decorative, earthly and otherworldly, abstract and figurative. Like a Rubin’s vase illustration where the

For this exhibition, Li Shurui’s debut solo presentation in Europe, the artist presented ten new paintings and a video, the roughly twenty-four-minute Marriage Certificate, 2018. Her first work in this medium—made with her husband, the musician Li Daiguo—the video weaves together the physical and emotional material of the couple’s relationship with flashes of their creative production. The eight paintings comprising The moment before evaporation, Me Nos. 1–5 and The moment before evaporation, You Nos. 1–3, all 2018, were displayed in level rows across large sheets of paper painted with

Born in 1970 to an Algerian family in a banlieue of Paris, Kader Attia has rooted his practice in the liminal, in-between spaces of postcolonial modernity. This exhibition—described by the venue as an “event-exhibition” and titled “Les racines poussent aussi dans le béton” (Roots Also Grow in Concrete)—correspondingly enfolds spectators into the vast exhibition space of the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (mac val) in a way that compels them to question their position in relation to those who establish roots in the margins of the European metropole and the postcolonial city.