Magma

In collaboration with the Centre Pompidou, Magma Journal is reviving surrealist inquiries in a special edition of the publication, to coincide with the retrospective exhibition marking one hundred years of Surrealism.

Available at newsstands and bookstores, this special edition brings together over 150 artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, photographers, designers, and academics from around the world. These unpublished contributions echo the original responses of the Surrealists.

Contributors include: Patti Smith, Georg Baselitz, Wolfgang Tillmans, Elizabeth Peyton, Anne Imhof, Hélène Delprat, Leïla Slimani, Yannick Haenel, Kamel Daoud, Leos Carax, Thomas Bangalter, Marina Abramović, Ed Ruscha, Jacques Audiard, Étienne Daho, Mohamed Bourouissa, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Xinyi Cheng, Erri De Luca, Ólafur Elíasson, Simone Fattal, Nicolas Godin, Thomas Hirschhorn, Amin Maalouf, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Paul McCarthy, Annette Messager, Peter Saville, Erwin Wurm, Andra Ursuţa, Kiki Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Patrick Chamoiseau, Christine Angot, Marie Darrieussecq, and many contemporary voices from different generations, styles, and backgrounds.

The journal becomes the testimony of a collective creation in homage to a significant gesture in the history of 20th-century art, proving that surrealist inquiries have lost none of their relevance and brilliance.

For these «New Surrealist Inquiries,» Magma Journal collaborates with the Centre Pompidou teams in an editorial committee composed of Didier Ottinger and Marie Sarré, the two curators of the exhibition, Jean-Max Colard, head of the Centre Pompidou’s Service de la Parole (Talks and Lectures), and their teams.

Magma revives the tradition of the great twentieth century revues d’art. Conceived as a forum for artistic expression, artists and writers collaborate and co-create. Magma is an invitation to participate in a dialogue that transcends the usual boundaries of the art world. It is a meeting place. Each artist’s contribution is an original or an unseen work, created for the publication or published for the first time. The journal brings together humans from different generations and backgrounds — artists, photographers, writers, directors, sculptors, architects. They have a free hand, both in form and content, to address a subject and build a narrative by producing a unique and original piece. Hans Ulrich Obrist, who wrote the publication preface, remarks: “Magma brings worlds into contact with other worlds.” Large format, bound like a book for annual publication, Magma is a rare object in an ever-faster paced society, providing us the opportunity to look, read, and collect.

Magma is a limited edition, number to 2000 copies.

In dialogue with :

Lucas Arruda

Alaa Al Aswany

Charles Baudelaire

Boris Bergmann

Tim Breuer

Sophie Calle

René Char

Erri De Luca

Luigi Ghirri

Édouard Glissant

J.W. von Goethe

François Halard

Nathanaëlle Herbelin

India Mahdavi

Claude Nori

Frida Orupabo

Andra Ursuța

Agnès Varda

Foreword by Hans Ulrich Obrist