The Art of Remembrance exhibition is reaching its final hosting site, opening on September 18 a La Coupole Museum in Wizernes, France. From 19 September, the exhibition will be open to the public until 15 November, closing the European tour of the project after previous stops at the Polo del Novecento in Turin (Nuto Revelli Foundation), the Bastogne War Museum in Belgium and the Sybir Memorial Museum in Poland. Bringing together artists Rebekka Bauer, Raphaël Dallaporta, Juhana Moisander and Gail Ritchie, the show presents works born from residencies undertaken at these hosting memorial sites, offering visitors a sensitive, intimate new way to engage with history.
The opening evening on September 18 will take place in the presence of Gail Ritchie, the artist who undertook her residency at La Coupole last year. The event will start at 18:30; for registration please send an email to evenements@lacoupole.com or call the following number 03 21 12 27 27.
The exhibition can also be discovered online here.
La Coupole as a Residency Site
As one of the project’s partner institutions, La Coupole welcomed artist Gail Ritchie for an extended residency, opening its archives, its underground tunnels and the expertise of its team to her research. Set within a monumental former V2 rocket base turned museum, the site offered a space shaped by the convergence of architecture, technology and history of forced labour and local communities impacted by the war. Its architecture, archives and surrounding landscape became central to Ritchie’s work.
Working from a small studio within the museum, Ritchie spent her residency moving between historical material, architectural experience and contemporary interpretation, allowing ideas to emerge gradually through repeated visits, conversation, observation and making.
Gail Ritchie: Between Progress and Suffering
Gail Ritchie is a Northern Irish visual artist based in Belfast whose practice explores the emotional impact of conflict, memory and loss through drawing, sculpture, installation and research. With academic training in both political science and fine art, she brings a multidisciplinary perspective to questions of how histories are internalised and remembered across time. In 2025, she received the Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council Northern Ireland in recognition of her practice, and her work is held in collections including the National Museums of Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Government Collection.
During her residency, Ritchie was drawn to a recurring tension at the heart of La Coupole: the coexistence of opposing narratives, including scientific ambition and forced labour, technological progress and human suffering, ambitions of space exploration and the realities of exploitation. Fragments uncovered in the archive resonated deeply, from Maurice Bourdon’s recipe notebook, an act of imaginative survival under deprivation, to photographs of Hector, a laboratory rat sent into space and later killed. These encounters shaped a body of work attentive to how lives, human and non-human, are instrumentalised by systems of power.
The exhibition presents four works from her residency. The Party juxtaposes a repainted vintage ceramic plate, in the camouflage colours of the V2 rocket, with an aluminium egg, bringing together domestic decoration, militarised aesthetics and Bourdon’s culinary acts of resistance. Hector (In memorium 1961) is a life-sized aluminium rat in an anti-gravity suit, suspended in space, memorialising the French space programme’s laboratory animal and drawing a parallel with the forced labourers of La Coupole, both treated as expendable bodies in the name of progress. The drawing series Crater / Creatura connects the site’s underground tunnels, the bombed wartime landscape, the cratered surface of the moon and the imprint of an egg dropped into concrete, linking geological, architectural and bodily forms of rupture. Finally, Macha – a taxidermy crow nesting in aluminium and silver wire above a concrete egg – draws on the wildlife now reclaiming the site and on the shape-shifting Irish goddess of war and transformation, bringing together fragility, endurance and survival.
Across each piece, Ritchie’s work opens a space for reflection on how systems of power shape and instrumentalise lives, treating La Coupole not simply as a site of wartime history, but as a place where the tensions between progress and violence continue to resonate.
About Art of Remembrance
Inscribed in a dynamic of European collaboration between artists, curators and memorial institutions, Art of Remembrance is coordinated by Tempora and the LRE Foundation, with the financial support of the European Union. The project brings together several major partner sites — La Coupole, the Nuto Revelli Foundation, the Bastogne War Museum and the Sybir Memorial Museum — all four of which are hosting this temporary, travelling exhibition during 2026.
