Gardien Party

"People don't ask us for much. Matisse, Chagall and toilets." Mohamed El Khatib and Valérie Mréjen set out to meet museum guards from all over the world, and recreate their routine and inner lives, inviting six security guards from all walks of life onto the stage.

Here, the guards aren't in the corner of a room watching us. They're in front of us, and we're watching them. The guardians of our artistic heritage talk to us, right in the eyes, about their daily lives. Boredom and vigilance; the immobility of the body, the mobility of the gaze; the pragmatic reality of surveillance and the fictions they compose to kill monotony. Gathered from museums in Paris, Lausanne, Vienna, Teheran, New York, St. Petersburg, Marseille, Hamburg, Aubusson, Prague, Orléans and Lisbon, these words offer us a fresh look at our love of art. Valérie Mréjen and Mohamed El Khatib, who with delicacy and facetiousness carry a very high idea of portraiture, depict with this original collaboration an unsuspected museum landscape.