Inside Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain’s transformation. Béatrice Grenier on architecture, cultural policy, and the future of exhibition-making

Béatrice Grenier, Director of Strategic Projects and International Programs at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, is a curator, author, and editor whose work thrives at the crossroads of art, architecture, and cultural policy.

She is currently curating an exhibition on the architecture of Jean Nouvel for the collateral programme of the XIX Venice Architecture Biennale and has been named co-curator of the Fondation Cartier’s inaugural exhibition at its new Palais-Royal spaces, opening October 25th, 2025.

Her career spans ambitious projects, film productions, and publications: from Metropolitan Nature, where she co-curated On Modernity—a series of conversations with internationally renowned architects—to large-scale collaborations with artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Sarah Sze, Solange Pessoa, Yokoo Tadanori. Alongside her curatorial practice, Grenier has written for leading journals including ArtAsiaPacific and the Journal of Curatorial Studies, Domus, and she is the author of several books and essays on contemporary art and architecture, with her forthcoming title Architecture for Culture: Rethinking Museums slated for release this September.

With hube, Grenier reflects on how exhibition-making and architectural vision intersect to shape the future of museums and cultural policy, exploring the delicate balance between curatorial ambition and the spatial, experiential possibilities of the built environment.

hube: Could you tell us about the role art played in your childhood? Was there a particular moment or influence—perhaps through your family—that first brought you into contact with the world of museums, architecture, or visual culture more broadly? Did your parents have a connection to this world, or did your curiosity develop independently?

Béatrice Grenier: My parents didn’t have any connection to the art world, architecture, or related fields. But I think it’s precisely because of that that they were so encouraging—reveling curiously through me in this kind of experimentation with art history. From a young age, I was really obsessed with the idea of studying art history. For them, it became a sort of wonder, a way to indulge in something they themselves didn’t have access to in their daily lives.

The moment I recall most vividly in terms of being drawn to museums and the art world was when my dad first took me to New York. I grew up in Montreal, and that trip was a turning point. I remember so clearly the shock of the city—the architecture, the contrast with the parks, which are themselves so highly designed, the museums, the sheer density of cultural offerings. I realised then that there is no real division between where art happens and where it doesn’t. Aesthetic experiences are everywhere—in urban environments, in nature, in museums. That shock of New York really crystallised my desire to move there and study. And that’s what I did. I applied for an internship at the Met—and I never left.

hube: Museums are fundamentally spaces for the physical experience of art and objects. In an increasingly digital and intangible world, how do you and the Fondation Cartier navigate that tension? What elements of physicality do you consider essential to preserve?

BG: It’s such an interesting kind of paradox that museums are continuing to proliferate all across the globe despite the advent of digital culture. You have access to so much knowledge on the tip of your fingers every day, but then in a way you don’t necessarily know how to look for it, what is good. Despite the feeling of swimming inside a digital encyclopaedia every day, you still need a strong editorial voice to understand new technologies, new culture, and somehow to be initiated to things that you wouldn’t necessarily be immediately drawn to. So I consider that to still be the fundamental role of the museum in any setting, be it urban or not—to be a kind of editor, to select from culture its best examples from which we can learn, be it from technical standpoints and aesthetic standpoints, and to offer an entry point to a specific field of knowledge.

Museums can continue to take on this task either from a physical standpoint or from a digital standpoint. Museums should be present in the digital space in a prominent way just as they are symbolically physically in a city—they have an architectural presence. So I think that they should be thinking more about their digital architecture and understanding the language that they should be developing online and not simply replicating the contents that they produce in their spaces offline. Museums have invented, since the mid-17th century, a really specific form of experiencing culture in three-dimensional space. If we think about it, it’s putting into one space objects that potentially have no relationship with one another and are creating connections across space and time—which is such a beautiful and unique thing. So how can the museum exacerbate this capacity to create connections across culture and across time? The digital should be the ideal space for the museum because in a way it has invented this form of fiction—creating connection across such broad spectrums of material culture. This is the essential element that the museum should preserve—this capacity to, on the one hand, create a connection that we have not foreseen across culture, but then make it available to the widest audience.

hube: What has guided your curatorial vision in connecting architecture, art, and institution-building under the Fondation Cartier’s roof?

BG: When I started at the Fondation Cartier—I initially joined to be work on the design phase of our new spaces—while I had always dabbled between art and architecture, it was really an important realisation from an institutional standpoint that the architectural change of the Fondation Cartier would significantly contribute to identity changes. Within a two-kilometre sort of radius, the Fondation is moving from the Left Bank to the Right [of Paris]—it’s night and day in terms of symbolic shift and institutional messaging. The building we are leaving was built by Jean Nouvel in the early nineties; it is a glass building set amidst a garden designed by an artist, Lothar Baumgarten and was a radical contribution to proposing something that was different from the succession of enclosed galleries of the white cube.

The 1994 Nouvel building is one that forced art into the idea of a natural setting, completely exposed to the meteorological changes provoked by a glass structure—light and darkness, rain or shine, and so on. But it was also slightly removed from the mainstream footpath of the city’s cultural attractions. Moving right across from the Louvre, into an existing building made of the iconic Parisian Haussmannian limestone—also synonymous with the urbanization of the first world expos, the first department stores in Paris, early modernity, the figure of the flâneur, and so forth—it became impossible to conceive of any exhibition in a space like that, redesigned by Jean Nouvel, without being confronted with this new architectural condition. This is where, as a curator, you are always, in some way, thinking about space : context is everything.

This was something much bigger in the sense that we’re not just thinking about the space within the building—we’re thinking about the space that the building occupies in the city. And anything that you conceive within that space will be speaking to a history, will be speaking to being across from the Louvre, the most symbolic historical iteration of what the European idea of the museum was. Working on the new Fondation’s architectural project was really a turning point in thinking differently as a curator—it’s not that the role or the approach should just be about saying something within art history, but about identifying new topics for art history itself in recognizing its new manifestations and technologies and be addressed to the city at large, to the contemporary moment.

hube: To your point, would you say that one of those dimensions is the ‘virtual non-tangible’?

BG: Especially, this is an incredible opportunity to think about these questions at the Fondation, as our program is global in essence—with a physical plant in Paris and an extremely dynamic and diverse range of international collaborations and partnerships. This means that it is a condition of our institution that some of our audiences approach our programme only through the means of the digital—and that is the case for many museums today. We’ve seen a lot of institutions wanting to make their collections accessible and publish articles online, which is extremely important because an audience is not just a physical audience. Some people will never come to Paris, and they will maybe just read a book, or watch a programme online, or visit an exhibition organised in collaboration with our partner institution. Definitely the role of the physical plane has completely changed, and the museum should be ubiquitous across all possible media, whether that be physical or digital.

hube: You’ve spent years at the intersection of architecture, art, and institution-building. How has your experience informed the writing of your book Architecture for Culture?

BG: Today architects are at the foreground of proposing new ways or new avenues for the museum. This was so clear to me when I visited the National Archives of Publication and Culture designed by Amateur Architecture Studio (founded Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu), which opened in Hangzhou, China in 2021. I discuss this example in the first chapter of my book, as it symbolizes a turning point the the formulation of what a museum can be,

For a long time, museums modelled their architecture in many ways on the experiences of former palaces, because the first museums were royal collections that were then made accessible to the public. There have been many evolutions and many directions taken of course across the twentieth century. What was interesting in the case of the National Archives of Publications and Culture was that only through architecture was it possible to put together different media that, in the traditional museum, were never seen together or were never really accomplished. The whole programme is based on the synthesis of a library and a museum. This is specific to the culture of China because there is this ambiguity between the written word—you find poetry and literature on the painting as well as on manuscripts—which, in Western museums, is treated differently: the experience of viewing and reading are always separate. You view the painting and then you read the text.

The whole blueprint of that museum designed by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu is based on the perspective of a scroll painting—a very iconic masterpiece from the Song Dynasty by the painter Li Cheng. What they’re trying to do is a synthesis of the history of painting, the history of architecture, and the history of institutions, in terms of bringing together library and museum. Only through a spatial organisation could the proposal for a new museum or new form of institution be actualised. Then, when I started to go back and think: is there any such example in Europe, the United States, Africa or South America right now? I started to become interested in looking at the museum through the prism of how architecture is really baptising a new form of cultural policy for museums. In the book, I identify objects, buildings, places or refurbishments that change in meaning if we do start to consider them museums. It’s a very personal approach, meant to open the question of what the museum can be.

hube: What does the phrase ‘cultural policy’ mean in the context of museums and why did you find it an important concept to explore in your book?

BG: Taking the responsibility of developing cultural policy is an ambition that I have for museums. It’s an important term to revive, because in policy there are the words ‘polis’, meaning “city” or “community” and what a museum does is address itself to the city and its community and include the city in its formulation of culture. Architecture is crystallising this—this is the argument of my book—but it’s crystallising the possibility of a cultural policy. It’s making a statement about what is the place of art and how to view art at a given point in time. That’s why you’ll find a lot of museums add on, grow, have additions, have extensions—because, in a way, the formulation that existed is insufficient or needs to be adjusted or amended. Cultural policy, really, is a bit of a provocation to the museum to take the responsibility to be something more than a hybrid form of education and entertainment—to affirm the place, subject matter, and form of the art in our time.

hube: As someone deeply embedded in the museum world, how do you personally define what makes an exhibition successful—emotionally, intellectually, or socially?

BG: It’s a crucial question. Exhibitions are fundamental in terms of showing us new understandings of the past or advancing knowledge in a given field, but also in terms of creating a space—a space where it is possible to experience this in a community, in a form of togetherness, let’s say, for lack of better terminology. Exhibitions should provoke either a new understanding of the past or bring about the identification of a new topic that should be addressed in the future of the writing of art history. For example, if you take some of the iconic exhibitions that one remembers, or that have, how to say, created or participated in art history, they were always exhibitions that identified something we hadn’t yet recognised as art.

An example of this motion is the theoretical identification of ‘Arte Povera’ by Germano Celant, which he published first in 1967. You still see exhibitions of Arte Povera that exhibit its main protagonists Mario Merz, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Michelangelo Pistoletto etc. In many ways, staging exhibitions under the banner of Arte Povera makes little sense today as it means to recite a canon, and perhaps adding or expanding it somewhat. At the time when Arte Povera was coined, it was really because we didn’t recognise that what artists like Giuseppe Penone were doing—that for example identifying organic elements as “ready made” was art. By creating an exhibition that identified that as art, it became something else. I’m also thinking about the ‘Explorations’ exhibition at the Smithsonian in 1970, organised by the Greek historian György Kepes, who put together artists working with early forms of cybernetics and really contributed to recognising experiments in art and technology as legitimate forms of art. People were like, ‘What is that? This isn’t art’. Yes—coding is a technology, is an art form, is a language that should, at that time, have been recognised as art, which is to say the language of contemporaneity. Or another strong example is the exhibition organized by Jean-François Lyotard, Les Immatériaux in 1985 who put in the exhibition space a computer for the first time, identifying the contemporary condition of the city as one of ubiquitous simultaneity. An exhibition should propose a new understanding of the past in terms of contemporary art, or identify the new location of where art is in our society.

hube: In an age when institutions are often under pressure to react quickly to social and political issues, how do you maintain space for long-term thinking and artistic freedom?

BG: I think that museums are not the space of politics. It’s very dangerous for museums to become politicised in a way that leaves no more room for art, or make art its tool. In this way, I think that in a time when school campuses are becoming more vulnerable—from a funding standpoint or from political standpoints—museums are the place in the city that should be preserved as a form of incubation for our future and freedom of experimentation. For this reason, it’s really important that the museum not try to take on the role of other institutions, in the sense that the parliament is where you do politics, school is where you attend class, and the museum is where different forms of hypotheses emerge—hypotheses of precisely how to organise ourselves and live as a society. What forms might these societies take in terms of thinking about new technologies, material research, architectural imagination? The museum, in dialogue with artists should remain the place of discussion to both inspire and listen to its community.

hube: How has working on your new book, Architecture for Culture, expanded or changed your pre-existing views about museums and their role in cultural progress? Was there something in your research that surprised you?

BG: The book—the whole research for it—was really crucial in pointing to a historical period of museum architecture where we are truly going in a new direction. I hope the book contributes to this by expanding the definition of the museum itself, even to spaces that are not traditionally regarded as museums. One of the chapters that I’m really proud of is called In-Between. Each chapter is a speculation on what a museum can be. This idea of In-Between is specifically about a historical artery in Stone Town, in Zanzibar, that splits two parts of the city that were segregated. The road is built on a former creek, and that road separates the UNESCO-protected historical part of the city—the 19th-century part—and the modern heritage. What I propose is to view this street, this open-air urban fragment, as allowing one to view history and to problematise even the notion of preserving colonial heritage architecture versus not preserving a modern architecture that was symbolic of the independence movement of Tanzania. This is what surprised me most—to see that it is really important to expand the definition of what a museum is, for it to take on new manifestations, be they a historical artery in Stone Town, Tanzania… to thinking about the museum as a wild landscape or a digital space.

hube: In October, the Fondation Cartier will open its new premises to the public at 2 Place du Palais-Royal—a major moment in the institution’s history. What possibilities does this new space offer from an architectural and curatorial perspective? How do you imagine the building shaping—or even challenging—the way exhibitions are conceived and experienced?

BG: The architecture of the new Fondation Cartier spaces introduces many opportunities for new ways to curate. It’s a paradigmatic shift from an institutional standpoint because it’s a transformation—a renovation—of a historical building, which was built in 1855 and was part of the urbanisation projects conceived and implemented by Haussmann at the time of the first World Expo. The task given to Jean Nouvel was to modernise a historical building, and what he proposed as an idea was to insert five platforms ranging from 200 to 340 square metres that can be adjusted to different heights. This means that the museum is on unstable ground: from an architectural standpoint, but also from a philosophical standpoint. Every time that a major exhibition is conceived, we start with the architecture and configure the platforms at different levels – which means that the wayfinding of the museum, the whole experience of the space, will change every time that a major exhibition takes place. It means that the building—the museum—really becomes an infinite incubator for how to make an exhibition.

From a spatial standpoint, what is the interaction of the change of architecture or positioning of the platforms with the rest of the museum—including visitor experience and the experience of the exhibitions themselves—but then also, I think, what it’s proposing from an institutional and curatorial history, even a physiological history, is that by having this kind of perpetually dynamic architecture, you’re never confined to a suggestion of a narration. There’s no obligation to physically experience art in any one way in this building. Implicitly, this is reshuffling the way in which museums have always worked—which is that they need a stable pathway for a permanent collection in order to tell the story of art, or to present the story that a museum believes, at a given point, is the narration of the history of art. With dynamic architecture, it’s dislodging the centrality of collections or of stability in art history and saying that the history—rather, the history of exhibitions or exhibition-making—should be at the centre of what museums articulate as a form of history.

hube: What are some of the Fondation Cartier’s most exciting upcoming projects or directions that you’re particularly passionate about?

BG: I am really looking forward to the inaugural exhibition opening, Exposition Générale, which I co-curated for the inauguration of the new spaces in Paris. It is a really ambitious exhibition that proposes, in many ways, an alternative form of encyclopaedia of contemporary art, drawing on works from the Collection of the Fondation Cartier. Further, I’m particularly excited about developing the Fondation Cartier’s international programmes in parallel with the institution’s architectural transformation in Paris. The Fondation has always valued partnerships with institutions across the world because we believe that curatorial intelligence is collaborative, and these partnerships should mutually inform the Parisian offering of the programming, while also allowing the Fondation to be in touch with different audiences across the world—different languages, different histories and cultures. A planetary dialogue. We are continuing to work with the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami (currently on view is a wonderful exhibition of Columbian textile artist Olga de Amaral, designed by award winning architect Lina Gotmeh). In 2026, we’ll continue working with our partner the Triennale Milano together addressing questions of ecology and design with a major jointly curated exhibition that will be open for the Salone week in April. We are likewise continuing to work with the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, our partner in China of over eight years, where a solo exhibition of French artist Fabrice Hyber closed this summer. We are likewise partner of the Sydney Biennale, which 2026 edition curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, commissioned 37 artists, including 15 First Nations artists from around the world. All of these programs are both local and global and meant to foster a program address to the widest possible audience.

hube: Do you see a shift in how young audiences interact with museums and exhibitions? How is the Fondation responding to that—or even embracing it?

BG: I’m very excited about the popularity of the museum in a general sense. We have a lot to thank technology for in this respect:  digital cultures has greatly enhanced our subjectivities as well as the speed of our interactions across cultures. In this sense, the museum is more than ever attractive to audiences who have this very heightened sense and awareness of our shared planetary culture. Young audiences are more aware than anybody that no culture lives in isolation anymore —we are a global culture and in touch everywhere at all times, influencing each other. Culture is no longer a geographic fact. We should recognise the precursory role of the museum in trying to foster this very kind of space. The Fondation Cartier’s international program is both embracing dynamically contributing to this shift.

hube: How do you see the role of the Fondation evolving in the next 10 years? What kind of legacy do you hope the Fondation leaves—not only in terms of exhibitions, but in how it shapes cultural responsibility or artistic discourse?

BG: I really hope that, due to its new position in the centre of Paris—across from the Louvre, across from one of the oldest public squares in Paris, the Place du Palais Royal—the Fondation can be identified as a space that is constantly dynamically rethinking the museum. We’re a cultural space. We are privately funded. We don’t call ourselves a museum, yet we have all the functions that a museum has—and we stand right in front of one of the most visited museums in the world. I hope that the Fondation can continue to be this alternative space that is complementary, but also questioning: what is the museum for? This architecture that is now at the heart of our building will be a catalyst for this. I hope that the Fondation will be the place where people come to experience, see or understand new possible iterations of what art can be.

hube: You’ve worked with some of the most influential artists of our time. Are there new generations of creators you’re currently watching?

BG: Yes. I don’t really think of artists or art in terms of generations because, much like we are now in increased contact with so many different geographies at all times, and all kinds of cultural influences are coming from a more distributed fashion than they used to, we are also less age-discriminate. We have also reduced generational thinking because of the speed of technology and the speed of knowledge today; there isn’t so much the same kind of social organisation where you spend your early years, then you go to school, then you stop learning, and then you work your whole life. We take on different roles at different points in our lives, and so we move across generations more fluidly (or hope we can !).

I am looking at topics or fields more than I’m looking at age, but some of the artists or creators that I’m really fascinated with these days are creators working in fashion, especially in East and South Asia. I’m thinking of Ruohan Nie, for example—she’s a Chinese fashion designer based in Shanghai and Paris— another emerging designer I am watching is Pratysh Kumar who founded PIEUX, based in New Dehli. These young creators are thinking about introducing bio-sourced material to redesign supply chains in the fashion industry. Because they’re based in Asia, they’re thinking very early on in their practice in terms of scale: how can you create new identities with clothes, but in sustainable ways that can be produced at scales that are extremely, extremely ambitious? This is an area, or field, or social–generational group that I’m interested in watching, and understanding how they can formulate and rethink what it means to design today.

An architect that I have a lot of admiration for is Freddy Mamani. Based in El Alto Bolivia, he has crystallised a new typology of architecture called the ‘cholet’: community centers atop which are built private residences. Its formal aspects take inspiration from diverse sources, that of Tiahuanaco, the ancient ruins found in the Andean plateau, the colorful fabrics of the traditional weaving culture, and natural elements of the landscape. It acts as an economic model for communities—Aymara communities, who are an Indigenous group in Bolivia. The architecture is incredibly beautiful, colourful; it is completely baroque and ambitious from a cultural standpoint. He is already thinking about building a museum to recreate in the style of a world expo. This is a new direction in architecture that I’m looking at.

I’m looking at artists working in experimental film and contributing to rethink the traditional medium of cinema such as Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel who are interrogating video game and internet archives, cultural memory, and adolescence. In a way, working precisely on the topic of what is a generation. This week, we are presenting “Best Secret Place” a film commissioned by the Fondation Cartier in Venice on the occasion of the Venice Internation Film Festival.

hube: If you could invite any living artist, from any discipline, to collaborate with the Fondation tomorrow—with no limitations—who would it be, and why?

BG: As a curator I think mostly in terms of questions that should inhabit the museum. I would love, for example, to invite a group of artists, architects and ecologists, for example, design an entirely new idea of what a city park is—and make that the exhibition. Or I would love to ask some video game designers to transform the museum into a video game: can we use the notion of playing as a hypothesis for community building? I am thinking—I am interested—but this is just from my curator’s standpoint, in terms of questions that I would like artists to work on and resolve, or propose ideas for, rather than exhibiting something that already exists.