J’ai vu runs at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris from 20 October 2026 to 21 February 2027, as part of the museum’s 40th-anniversary programme. Rather than occupying a conventional temporary-exhibition gallery, Holzer intervenes across the museum and its architecture.

At the centre of the project are words. Holzer has selected fragments from artists’ correspondence in the Musée d’Orsay archives, together with literary and political commentary from the period represented by its collection. These historical voices are redistributed through the media that have defined her career.

Outside, texts will be projected in light onto the museum’s historic façade. Inside, a specially conceived LED carries streams of language through galleries devoted to History Painting, Naturalism and Symbolism. The movement of the text also responds to the building’s original identity as the Gare d’Orsay railway station.

Holzer also introduces gold-, platinum- and palladium-leafed redaction paintings and newly created stone benches engraved with texts from the 1848–1914 period. The benches are deliberately positioned in dialogue with both Gae Aulenti's museum design and the permanent collection.

The result connects past and present rather than simply inserting contemporary art into a historical museum: the voices contained within the Orsay become Holzer's raw material.

Jenny Holzer (b. 1950, Ohio) is an American conceptual artist who has made language her primary artistic material. Since the late 1970s, she has placed provocative statements in public spaces using posters, electronic signs, projections, stone benches and monumental installations, addressing power, violence, politics, gender, truth and collective memory.

★★★★★ — Worth the trip

This is exactly the kind of contemporary intervention that can make a familiar museum feel new. Holzer isn't simply bringing her work into the Orsay: she is using the museum itself — its archives, architecture, collection and history — as her material.