From 27 March to 28 April 2025
11, quai de Conti - 75006 Paris
In the museum halls
BABEL II - April 2025
The Monnaie de Paris is once again exhibiting works by Robert Alice, a pioneering artist in cryptographic and NFT art.
This event marks the second stage of a project initiated in 2023 with the BABEL exhibition, which ran from 30 June to 22 October 2023. This exhibition, the fruit of a collaboration between the Monnaie de Paris, the laCollection platform and Robert Alice, had already marked a turning point by integrating NFT works into a renowned museum institution for the first time.
As the Monnaie de Paris site at 11 quai de Conti celebrates its 250th anniversary, this new display symbolises a unique bridge between historical heritage and technological innovation. The palace on the Quai de Conti, built in 1775, has embodied excellence in craftsmanship and artistry for more than two centuries. Today, it is also a place for experimentation and dialogue between age-old traditions and new forms of digital expression.
An evolving project: from the BABEL exhibition to entry into the national collections
Since the BABEL exhibition, several works by Robert Alice have joined the collections of the Monnaie de Paris and other prestigious institutions. Among them, Virunga has been placed on deposit at the Musée de la Monnaie de Paris, while Ornament and Crisis has been generously donated to the museum, reinforcing the institution's position as one of the first museums to include NFT works in its permanent collections.
Two works by Robert Alice have also recently been acquired by the Musée national d'art moderne (Mnam) - Centre Pompidou: Portrait of a Mind and, above all, Garden City from the Blueprints series designed for the Monnaie de Paris.
An exhibition that resonates with history and technology
The BABEL exhibition had already highlighted the way in which Robert Alice explores the links between blockchain technology and history, creating hybrid works that are both digital and physical. These works, inspired by the heritage collections and building of the Monnaie de Paris, provided an opportunity to reflect on materiality and historical continuity, rather than a supposed break between past and future.
The new exhibition in April 2025 continues this reflection by presenting new works by Robert Alice, while reaffirming La Monnaie de Paris' commitment to artistic and technological innovation. A new group of works from the Blueprints, Stasis Fields series will be on display in the museum. Visitors will also be able to see some of the works from the BABEL exhibition, now part of the museum's collections (Virunga and Ornament & Crisis).
The Blueprints, Stasis Fields
The Blueprints are inspired by architectural plans and industrial drawings in the collections of the Monnaie de Paris, and rework them into large-scale abstractions. Stasis Fields explores the technological idea of the singularity and its popular visual association with black holes. Drawing on plans from the archives of the Monnaie de Paris, these works reinterpret these plans by transforming them into speculative explosions. These cosmological network structures establish a link between the socio-cultural shift towards decentralisation and our oldest decentralised network: the stars.
Ornament & Crisis
Directly influenced by recent events, this series was inspired by the intense media coverage surrounding the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and then Credit Suisse in 2023. Robert Alice delves into history and selects around a hundred of these financial crises, from 33 BC to the present day. He contrasts these moments of chaos and instability with the solidity embodied by the neo-classical building of the Monnaie de Paris. Through images taken by LiDAR scans, the building takes on a ghostly appearance, becoming transparent and unstable.