Le Musée Imaginaire d’Oli

The Grand Palais presents Le Musée imaginaire d’Oli, an exhibition conceived by the artist and musician Oli (Bigflo & Oli), with the collaboration of Jérôme Sans. Room by room, traverse the inner states that give birth to a work: inspiration, doubt, the gaze of others, refuge and transmission. A journey between the worlds that have shaped Oli.

Designed as an initiatory narrative, a journey inviting visitors to traverse the different rooms of the exhibition as successive inner states, Le Musée imaginaire d’Oli lays bare the mechanisms at work in the creative process: the primal shock of a vocation, the flash of inspiration, the vertigo of doubt, the confrontation with others’ gaze, the intimate refuge, the act of transmitting. From this perspective on the inner process of a creator, this exhibition weaves links from one world to another, from Oli’s Franco‑Algerian and Argentine origins in Paris, from street culture to museum culture, uniting, without hierarchy, cultural universes that seem to oppose one another.

Emerging from popular culture, shaped by the stage and by words, Oli has made dialogue between disciplines and between audiences a second nature. He thus reclaims the concept of the imaginary museum formulated by André Malraux: a museum conceived as the portrait of a singular thought, traversed by multiple cultures, heterogeneous temporalities, and registers that the history of art has long hierarchized. Thus freed from cultural, geographical and symbolic borders, Oli’s imaginary museum blends icons from different territories by freeing itself from traditional categories: contemporary art, urban cultures, underground scenes, sport, cinema, fashion or graffiti.

As a choral work, Oli’s voice dialogues in this exhibition with the voices of invited artists who inhabit its spaces, giving rise to several new creations. The through-line, the sound accompanies the visitor from room to room: voices, archives, music, and the city’s hum invite them to explore the meanders of an artist’s consciousness.

Deployed over nearly 1,300 m² and three levels, bringing together around a hundred works, the exhibition extends in Paris the curatoral intention of the musician initiated at the Abattoirs FRAC Occitanie in Toulouse. It ends with a gesture of transmission that gradually shifts Oli’s gaze toward that of the visitor, invited to take part in the narrative and to become one of its actors. The imaginary museum thus ceases to be individual and becomes collective: neither a life’s story nor a taste collection, the exhibition is above all the experience of becoming oneself despite the noise of the world.

Exhibition designed by Oli - Olivio Ordonez - and developed with the collaboration of Jérôme Sans. Produced by La Familia and Unless Agency, in partnership with the Grand Palais RMN.

Curators: Olivio Ordonez (artist with Bigflo & Oli) and Jérôme Sans. Scenography: Jean-Baptiste Hardoin.