« Adventice » by JR, a 10 000 hands artwork !
- Delphine & Romain Class
- Jul 26
- 5 min read
It's an event the city has been waiting for for seven years: the reopening of Carré Sainte-Anne, a contemporary art mecca nestled in the heart of Montpellier's escutcheon. To celebrate this rebirth, the city has entrusted the first exhibition to JR, an internationally renowned contemporary artist known for his monumental, socially engaged installations. With "Adventice," he has created an immersive, participatory, and deeply symbolic work that breathes new life and meaning into this former place of worship, transformed into an artistic cathedral.
A Long-Awaited Reopening: Sainte-Anne Rediscovers the Light
The Carré Sainte-Anne, a former neo-Gothic church built at the end of the 19th century, closed its doors in 2018 for a complete restoration. Over seven years, the work consolidated the building, modernized its infrastructure, and restored the frescoes, stained-glass windows, and vaults. The nave floor now features heated parquet flooring, access has been made fully accessible, and a simple scenography has been designed to accommodate ambitious exhibitions.
With its 700 m² of light-filled exhibition space, the Carré Sainte-Anne is positioned as one of the finest contemporary art venues in the south of France. Its reopening sends a strong signal for the city's cultural policy, which aims to strengthen its artistic appeal and international influence.
Adventice: An Organic, Living, and Evolving Work
At the heart of this renaissance, the work Adventice offers a striking experience: a monumental tree suspended in the central nave, whose branches are made of more than 10,000 scanned handprints from around the world. Each hand is unique, but together, they form a united, powerful, and silent whole.
In botany, the word "adventice" refers to a plant that grows where it has not been sown—often perceived as undesirable, even harmful. Here, JR twists this term to create an emblem of presence, migration, and unexpected but fertile roots. The installation becomes a contemporary allegory of human movement, the blending of identities, and the richness of diversity.
A participatory, inclusive, and constantly evolving project
Adventice's strength lies in its participatory dimension: JR wanted the work to continue to grow throughout the duration of the exhibition. For several months, scanning devices have been installed in public spaces (neighborhood town halls, schools, media libraries, train stations, etc.) to allow everyone to participate. Visitors can also scan their hand on site, at Carré Sainte-Anne, and see their print appear on the nave tree a few days later.
More than 15,000 prints are expected by December. Each one is transformed into a sculpted piece of wood or lightweight composite material, then meticulously hung in the space, giving the tree a slow, organic, and collective growth.
Five Satellite Works: The Language of Materials
In addition to the central installation, five new works are exhibited in the side chapels and the choir. Made of burnt wood, paper, and glass, they explore traces, memory, and materials. Some are inspired by identity documents, fingerprints, and migration cards. Others evoke scars or tree rings.
Far from the monumentality of the tree, these works offer a more intimate dialogue with the visitor: they reveal the discreet poetics of identity, the porosity between the individual and the collective, between wound and beauty. They embody JR's signature style: minimalist, raw, yet carrying universal resonances.
Local roots, universal reach
Montpellier was not chosen at random. A crossroads city, open to the Mediterranean, boasting the oldest botanical garden in France and a tradition of intellectual and medical hospitality, it embodies this idea of the intersection of human and plant flows. The history of the Jardin des Plantes, for example, recalls that exotic seeds arrived there accidentally in bales of fabric washed in the Lez River. These simple "weeds" enriched the local biodiversity over time. JR transposes this idea into the social and political sphere: unexpected presences, "displaced" identities, far from uprooting, can nourish and transform.
A humanist and poetic message, far from the spectacular
Unlike some of JR's more high-profile works (such as the collage on the Louvre pyramid or the trompe-l'oeil of the US-Mexico border), Adventice does not seek to create a shocking effect. Here, the artist adopts a posture of listening, humility, almost contemplation. In this former place of worship, the spiritual dimension emerges: the suspended hands take on the air of contemporary votive offerings, the tree evokes life, memory, and peace. The exhibition does not preach: it invites contemplation, reflection on the human community and the importance of each presence.
A work that resonates through time
Adventice is a work at the crossroads of memories, where the individual meets the collective, and where the local opens up to the universal. It marks the rebirth of the Carré Sainte-Anne, but also a new lease of life for contemporary art in Montpellier, which seeks to assert itself as a city of creation, innovation, and dialogue. A successful challenge: JR offers here a gentle, powerful, and sensitive work that will touch children and adults alike, the initiated and the merely curious. A tree grows beneath the vaults of Sainte-Anne—and with it, a forest of silent hopes.
About JR, the artist of the faces of the world
JR, born in 1983 in Paris, is a French artist whose work lies at the intersection of photography, street art, film, and social engagement. He began his career pasting black and white portraits on the walls of Parisian suburbs, before becoming one of the most influential contemporary artists of his generation.
Advocating an "artivist" approach, JR is distinguished by his monumental collages of anonymous faces, often exhibited in public spaces without permission, in a desire to make art accessible to all. He has notably worked in Rio's favelas, Nairobi's slums, Palestinian refugee camps, Israeli separation walls, and the facades of iconic museums such as the Palais de Tokyo and the Guggenheim. His project "Portrait of a Generation" (2004–2006) in the disadvantaged neighborhoods of Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil attracted the attention of the general public and the media for the first time.
Universal and participatory projects
In 2011, he won the TED Prize and launched the Inside Out project, a global platform for participatory portraits that has brought together more than 500,000 people in 149 countries. He invites people to share their message and their faces through large photographic prints pasted in public spaces.
Among his notable projects:
- "Women Are Heroes" (2008-2011): a tribute to women in conflict zones
- "Face 2 Face" (2007): portraits of Israelis and Palestinians pasted face to face on the separation wall
- Installation on the Louvre Pyramid (2016 and 2019)
- Collage on the Pantheon (2021)
- Installation on the US-Mexico border (2017), transforming a barrier into a visual bridge
JR, filmmaker and author
JR is also a director. In 2017, he co-directed the documentary "Visages Villages" with Agnès Varda, which won the Golden Eye at Cannes and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary. He followed this with Paper & Glue (2021), an autobiographical documentary about his projects and artistic approach.
A humanist and committed body of work
Driven by a concern for social justice, the visibility of the invisible, and the poetics of memory, JR defines himself as a witness: "I don't make people speak, I give them a face." His work unfolds between the intimate and the monumental, between the aesthetic and the ethical, always with a focus on creating connections, insights, and meaning.
JR Today
Based between Paris and New York, JR continues to lead collaborative artistic projects around the world. His exhibition, Adventice, presented in Montpellier, is a continuation of his approach: creating large-scale works from thousands of individual stories, in a profoundly collective and humanist artistic gesture.
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