Born in 1961 in Nice, France, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot lives and works in Sète, France.
Major figure in the landscape of international contemporary art, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot invites us to be listeners who also see, who explore the modalities of permanence and present and to be, as he calls it, «distracted listeners». His immersive installations are investigations into sound-space and presence. Noises in our daily environment or residual noises that are not made for a musical purpose are rich in a potential that Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s installations transform into a «listening experience». The sound of a car driving by, of a chair that’s being dragged, the familiar hum of appliances or the clinking of porcelain bowls floating in a pool: those are all the fleeting data and materials used by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot to conceive the installations that accompany the physiological rhythm of our life and that extend the expectations of «environment music». He uses the flaws of his systems and technical incidents like audio or video feedbacks; he plays on the mismatching of sources with virtuosity: video signals are treated like sounds, he connects harmonicas to vacuum cleaners or uses electric guitars as bird tables.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot is the laureate of the Confirmation Prize in Sculpture awarded by the Simone and Cino Del Duca Foundation 2023 – French Institut, upon proposal of the French Academy of Fine Arts (Académie des Beaux-Arts).
In 2015, he represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale.
He took part in the 13th and the 14th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Lyon in 2015 and 2017.
Numerous institutions have organized solo exhibitions of his work: Park Avenue Armory, New York, USA (2026), Frac Normandie, Caen, France (2026), Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris, France (2025), Arter Museum, Vebhi Koç Foundation, Istanbul, Turkey (2019), François Schneider Foundation in Wattwiller (2019), the HAB Galerie in Nantes (2018), the Minsheng Art Museum of Shanghai and the Centre d’art contemporain Yverdon-les-Bains in Switzerland (2017), the Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark (2016-2017), the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015), the Forum of Centre Pompidou-Metz (2015), the Abattoirs de Toulouse (2014), the Peabody Essex Museum in the United-States (2014), the National Gallery Victoria in Melbourne (2013) or among others the Maison Rouge in Paris (2010).
Public collections (selection): Tang Museum Saratoga Springs (New York), Collection National Gallery Victoria (Melbourne), FRAC Franche-Comté (Besançon), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Seattle (Washington), FNAC (Paris), MNAM – Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon (Montpellier), Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego), FRAC Lorraine (Metz), CAPC musée de Bordeaux (Bordeaux), FRAC Limousin (Limoges).
