Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled, 1997 - 2024 © Nobuyoshi Araki © Musée Guimet, Paris / Image: Nicolas Fussler.
Curated by Cécile Dazord and Édouard de Saint-Ours, project manager for contemporary art and for photographic collection at the museum.
A prolific, obsessive and deliberately provocative Japanese photographer, Nobuyoshi Araki has been a key figure in the history of Japanese and international photography since the 1960s.
Produced between 1997 and 2024, the Araki Polaroids featured in the exhibition were gradually acquired over the past 25 years from mainly French and Japanese galleries by collector Stéphane André, who donated them to the Guimet Museum in May 2025. Displayed in the rotunda on the fourth floor of the museum, POLARAKI presents the installation designed by the collector for his apartment: 43 columns composed of 9 frames arranged edge to edge from floor to ceiling. In each frame, there are one, two, three or four Polaroids, arranged in combinations chosen partly by Araki and partly by the collector.
The exhibition pays tribute to Araki's frenetic use of Polaroid photography, which since the late 1990s has been an almost daily ritual for him, serving his scopic and erotic impulses and fuelling a kind of diary around which his entire body of work revolves.
The show also refers to the appropriation by a private collector of an artist's work in a form reminiscent of cabinets of curiosities – characterised by the saturation of a personal space, a taste for the strange or even the licentious, and a heterogeneous nature.
Stéphane André's exceptional donation to the Guimet Museum is a significant contribution to the museum's policy of enriching its collections in the fields of contemporary Asian art and photography. It continues the work begun with the Araki retrospective exhibition presented at the museum in 2016.
More information: Musée Guimet