Nicolas Ballet's lecture

Born in England in the mid-1970s, the industrial music movement opens up sound experience to a wide range of artistic practices, setting up a multimedia research platform that evolves outside the institutional circuits of art. The issues raised by these artists are not so marginal, however, when they react epidermically to the hecatomb of post-industrialization and reflect on a debunking of high and low hierarchies, constituting a direct bridge to postmodernity, the hallmark of the artistic field in the 1970s and 1980s.

This presentation discusses how alternative cultures can be explored within the field of art history, while specifying the problematics that accompany the study of corpora that anticipate current interrogations around the media and its coercive power; from the dissidence of the industrial genre and its cultural transformations, to a new research project, "Hardcore from the Heart", focusing on pro-sex perspectives from the 1960s to the present.


Doctor in art history and curatorial attaché at the Centre Pompidou, Nicolas Ballet devotes his research to alternative visual cultures, experimental art, sound studies and artistic avant-gardes. He teaches contemporary art history and explores in his texts the visual and sonic contributions of countercultures and experimental artistic practices. He is the author of Shock Factory. Visual culture of industrial music (Les presses du réel, 2023), two books on Genesis P-Orridge and has notably published in Les Cahiers du Mnam, Octopus Notes, Marges, Optical Sound, in Cahiers du CAP and Histo.art at Éditions de la Sorbonne, as well as in works devoted to the works of Nigel Ayers, Zoe Dewitt and The Rita. He recently curated the exhibition "Who You Staring At? Visual Culture of the 1970s and 1980s No Wave Scene" (Centre Pompidou, 2023) and designed the "Sound Art Live" program and listening room for the exhibition I Never Dream Otherwise than Awake : Journeys in Sound (Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai, 2024). He is currently conducting a research project on pro-sex perspectives in art from the 1960s to the present day. Find out more

This lecture series is a co-production of UCArts - Direction de la Culture d'Université Côte d'Azur and the National Museum of the XXth century in the Alpes-Maritimes. The six lectures are organized in partnership with the association des Amis du musée national Marc Chagall.

To discover our 2024-25 season lecture series, click here

Nicolas Ballet. Photo: © DR, 2024