Through Vie des Formes, art and design engage with and influence one another, blurring the boundaries between them.
The exhibition’s curators reflect on this fluidity between disciplines, the resonances woven between works from the Collection Lafayette Anticipations and creations produced through AlUla’s design programs, and the ways these objects continue to evolve through their uses, contexts, and the perspectives they inspire. The exhibition’s title echoes art historian Henri Focillon’s book Vie des formes (1934), in which art and architecture “collaborate in the creation of a world.” For this discussion, Clément Delépine, director of Lafayette Anticipations and co-curator of the exhibition, Arnaud Morand, Head of Arts and Creative Industries at AfalUla and co-curator of the exhibition, and Ali Alghazzawi, Head of the Artist Residency Program at the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU) and associate curator, revisit the choices that shaped the dialogue between pieces from AlUla’s residency programs and works from the Collection Lafayette Anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin. They are joined by designers Ori Orisun Merhav and Mehdi Kebaier ( ALTIN Studio ), both participants in AlUla’s 2025 design residency program, to discuss how works such as Harrat by Studio ThusThat, Palm Chronicles by ALTIN, and Die Bibliothek I by Katinka Bock approach material as a repository of gestures and layered histories. Together, they explore the connections between contemporary art and design, considered here as two sister disciplines. Discussion moderated by Formae.
Source: paris.fr — photo: screenshot_2026-08-03_at_15.59.10