Moteur Imaginaire — Large, Île Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt, 17 October 2026 – 7 March 2027

For most of the twentieth century the Île Seguin, in the Seine at Boulogne-Billancourt, was a Renault factory. On 17 October 2026 a new art centre opened on the island, and its first exhibition is about the machine that was built there. Moteur Imaginaire (“Imaginary Engine”), at Large, brings together more than a hundred works from the 1930s to today — 55 artists from 23 countries, about half of them living or working in France, with seventeen new commissions made for the show — around the car as a symbol of innovation, progress and freedom, and around what the factory did to the people and the landscape that served it.

The exhibition is curated by Cecilia Alemani, who directed the Venice Biennale in 2022, and is organised in partnership with the Fonds Renault pour l’art et la culture, whose historic collection supplies the older half of the show: Jean Tinguely, Victor Vasarely, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Doisneau. The contemporary commissions include Mohamed El Khatib, Bertrand Lavier, Clément Cogitore and Théo Mercier.

It is arranged in five sections. Usine de mes pensées looks back at Renault’s “Recherche, Art et Industrie” programme of the 1960s, when the company invited artists into the works. Forces motrices takes the car and the assembly line as metaphors for the social systems of the last century. Corps sociaux follows the workers, the immigrant labour and the resilience of the industrial communities. Objets du désir treats the car as an extension of the body and as a fetish. La machine humaine asks where the boundary between person and machine now lies.

Large is a private art centre run by the Emerige group; The Art Newspaper’s report on the opening names Laurent Dumas as president and founder and Paula Aisemberg as general director. The building, on the site of the former Renault works, is by RCR Arquitectes with the Paris practice CALQ.

Practical details

• Dates: 17 October 2026 – 7 March 2027
• Opening hours: Wednesday to Sunday 11am–7pm, late opening Friday until 9pm; closed Monday and Tuesday
• Admission: €15; €10 reduced (students over 26, teachers, partners, groups of ten or more); free for under-26s, visitors with disabilities and their companions, artists, job seekers, asylum seekers and ICOM, ICOMOS, AICA and CEA card holders
• Where: Large, 3 parvis Amont, Île Seguin, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France
• Tickets and information: large-emerige.fr — +33 1 89 40 79 89

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition because the Île Seguin is one of the great industrial sites of France, and because a show that opens a new building by asking what the old factory meant is, in the most literal sense, heritage work.