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43 rue Saint-Georges
75009 Paris
France
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About
DNL gallery is a new gallery based in Paris, opening in March 2024. It is positioned as an exhibition, exploration and prospecting space dedicated to architecture in all its components.
The gallery aims to highlight the close links between the visual arts, media, contemporary culture and architecture, promoting their encounter and presenting their interactions. This is neither a confrontation between disciplines nor an eclectic selection, but a synthesis, a perspective that raises many questions. How do we select the pieces to be exhibited? Should the creative process be broken down? And what about references? Above all, how can architecture be collected?
To achieve its mission of encouraging these questions and fostering a better understanding of the built environment, the gallery will produce original works solicited from a new generation of architects, as well as selecting older works. While the most contemporary initiatives are exhibited, heritage and the history of architecture are by no means neglected.
The gallery is located in an apartment in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, offering an unusual setting for presenting architecture. An office, a living room and a storeroom will now be transformed into exhibition spaces to share architecture, its details, fragments and concepts with a specialised public, while seeking to reach as wide an audience as possible.
DNL stands for Double Neon Light, the leitmotif of exhibition spaces.
03 September – 11 October 2026
Some tools enter our lives so quietly that the adjustments they produce come to feel like our own. They form an everyday infrastructure of adjustment, acting through small and repeated changes to posture, movement and vision. Best Intentions presents two such devices: a surveillance mirror and an ergonomic ball. Each is doubled. The mirror is formed from two joined hemispheres; the ball contains two inflated volumes within a sewn leather skin.
A surveillance mirror extends peripheral vision beyond the forward direction and reduces blind spots. A seating ball extends our softest flesh, becoming an intermediary through which posture is adjusted to compensate for the effects of prolonged desk work. Both treat bodies and spaces as conditions to be monitored, corrected or made more efficient.
To double these tools is to introduce molecular logic, rather than to improve their function. In chemistry, dimerization is the process by which two identical or similar molecular entities join through bonds to become more stable or more active. An aberrant dimer is a faulty pairing that disrupts the system it enters.
Like aberrant dimers, the doubles in Best Intentions do not provide more effective control or support, but become material outgrowths of the body’s representation and use, turning it into a shared, unstable entity. The double mirror does not simply widen vision: it divides and folds the image it produces. The double ball does not improve ergonomic performance: it redistributes instability, calling for a second weight across the adjacent volumes.
These are, for us, the truly best intentions: apparently ordinary and polite, yet returning as faulty extensions that destabilise the relation between body and tool, making unclear who serves whom, as each slightly unsettles the other.
Truwant + Rodet + is an architectural practice founded in Basel in 2015 by Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet. Their practice operates at the intersection of architecture, landscape, urbanism, scenography, installation, furniture and research.
Attentive to territorial dynamics and the transformation of existing structures, they approach time, uncertainty and environmental conditions as materials in their own right within the design process.
Rather than seeking to fix architecture in a permanent state, their work aims to create structures capable of evolving, altering over time and engaging with their context. This approach runs through their buildings as well as their research, exhibitions and objects.
Recipients of the Swiss Art Award in 2017 for A Pavilion, they have since developed several large-scale transformation projects, including the renovation of the Swiss Cultural Centre in Paris with ASBR, the conversion of the Nauentor postal distribution centre in Basel with Bruther and Jan Kinsbergen, and the transformation of the IWAZ site in Wetzikon. Since 2023, Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet have taught together at EPFL, where their Atelier for Uncertain Conditions extends their research into architecture as an open-ended and evolving process, in dialogue with landscape, climate and patterns of use.
Every Island was founded in Brussels in 2021. As a spatial practice, it focuses on performativity in architecture through research, design and installations. At its core is the idea that space shapes behaviour: design becomes a tool to question and disrupt inherited normative models, while performance becomes a shortcut to activate new scenarios. The collective’s work has been presented at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, BOZAR Brussels and Mudam Luxembourg. Every Island current members are Alessandro Cugola, Martina Genovesi, Astrid Lykke and Juliane Seehawer.
Photographie par Aurélien Mole.