Hosts at the Louvre is the culmination of a two-year residency in which Kader Attia and Elizabeth Peyton were given an unusually privileged position: not occasional visitors, but artists with studios inside the Louvre. They spent time exploring its physical and imagined spaces, speaking with museum staff and audiences, and allowing the collection to enter their own practices. The resulting exhibition brings their responses together in the Salle de la Chapelle without forcing them into one shared visual language.

Attia presents a film and installation shaped by his journeys through the museum and by questions of age, memory and the shifting act of looking. Peyton shows paintings and drawings, combining new portraits with reinterpretations of Louvre works — something she has done since early in her career. Together, they reveal the museum less as a fixed repository of masterpieces than as a place where contemporary artists can keep generating new meanings.

Kader Attia (b. 1970, Dugny) is a French-Algerian artist based between Paris and Berlin. His conceptual practice frequently explores colonial histories, repair, cultural memory, trauma and the way museums shape knowledge, working across installation, sculpture, photography and film.

Elizabeth Peyton (b. 1965, Connecticut) is an American painter based between Paris and New York, celebrated for intimate, psychologically charged portraits of friends, artists, musicians, historical figures and cultural icons. Her small-scale paintings helped renew contemporary interest in portraiture from the 1990s onward.