PARIS (AFP).- The Pompidou Centre in Paris, home to Europe's biggest collection of modern art, will reopen on July 1 with debates about racial discrimination and a major show called "Global(e) Resistance".

The museum said Wednesday that its summer programme will be focused on the global south, with its flagship show opening at the end of the month featuring artists from Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

With the Black Lives Matter movement shaking many corners of the globe, the museum said a series of debates involving artists and academics will begin the very next day "to cast light on the burning issue of discrimination".

The "Global(e) Resistance" exhibition will also look back on work created as old certainties were tested and shaken by decolonisation and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.

The Grand Palais exhibition hall will also reopen on July 1, with the Louvre -- the world's most visited museum -- ending its coronavirus closure on July 6.

The Musee d'Orsay will be the first of the "Big Four" Paris museums to reopen on Monday, but only to a limited number of visitors.




Pompidou director Serge Lasvignes said only 200 people would be allowed in an exhibition at any one time, with a limit of 816 in the rest of the building.

"We want to reopen the doors to pleasure of art and at the same time show how it can also grab the world" as a motor of activism, Lasvignes added.

The show dedicated to the Bulgarian-born artist Christo and his French wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, which was suspended by the lockdown, will also run until October.

Christo, who was famous for wrapping buildings such as the Reichstag in Berlin and the Pont Neuf in Paris, died last month aged 84.

One of his final projects was to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in the French capital in September.

The project has now been pushed back to late next year.


© Agence France-Presse