Surrounded by the ring of the Passage, studded with a constellation of 24 display cases and accentuated by Tadao Ando's concrete volute, the zenithal Rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce, built in 1889, conserves the memory of its previous incarnations. In the sixteenth century, it was the palace of Catherine de' Medici flanked by its astronomical observation tower, and then, in the seventeenth century, the Halle au blé (Wheat Exchange) part of a tradition of with its circular floor plan. This remarkable architecture is constructions - from Hadrian's Pantheon in Rome to the utopian architecture of Boullée and Ledoux-that have used spherical forms as a metaphor for the symbolic forming of the world. Through the vast painted panorama of its marouflage canvas, it also features a paradoxical world tour, glorifying France's commercial expansion during the Third Republic. An artist of travel, crossings, and nomadism, since her eleven-day truck journey - across Korea, perched on makeshift fabric bundles - Kimsooja has deposited a constellation of works at the Bourse de Commerce, spanning nearly forty years of her artistic practice, as though laying down her luggage after a long voyage, so as to stay for a while, on her infinite trajectory, at this unique building. Echoing Tadao Ando's thought and his quest for an architecture of the void and the infinite, Kimsooja covers the floor of the Rotunda with mirrors and transforms the work of art - beyond an object, an installation, or an image into an essential experience. Between and disappearance, contemplation and astonishment, dizziness and dazzlement, the void thus transfigured is no longer, in François Cheng's words, "an inert presence, it is pervaded by breaths connecting the visible world to an invisible world."[1] The mirror that also presents a gathering place, inviting us to form a collective world.

Giving form and life to works that are not inert objects but immaterial presences engaging with the invisible and ephemeral, Kimsooja sets artworks in motion that are often spherical, grains of sand or flaxseed, porcelain or clay balls, fabric bottaris and moon jars in earthy colours. These arrangements that form miniature worlds or microcosms within the enclosed space of the display cases appear to have been put back into circulation, like an intangible choreography, sparked by the artist's gestures, which brought them into being, and animated by the slow and inexorable course of the stars as they make their way across the huge glass oculus. Peter Sloterdijk, in his trilogy Sphères (1998-2004), paints a philosophical history of humanity from the point of view of this fundamental form that is the sphere and which, according to the philosopher, allows humans to invent their own material, symbolic, and cosmological environment, thus enabling them to inhabit the world. Each clay ball shaped in the palm of Kimsooja's hand contributes to instituting a universal cosmogony, and awakens the power of archetypes and myths contained within the clay: the raw material of the human body. Each bottari is like a skin clinging to the body, from birth to death, like a shroud. The artist specifies the extent to which the "bottari is everywhere - body and mind, womb and tomb, globe and universe, … folding and unfolding our mind and geography, time and space."[2] Bottari, like a metaphor and extension of the human body in its eternal progression through the life cycle, weaves together Asian and Western cultures, everyday life and art, the individual and the universal, past and present, life on Earth and cosmic time, since - according to Kimsooja - each bottari can resemble a planet in motion, like the eclipse oriented towards Goa Beach, in India, in A Mirror Woman: The Sun & The Moon, 2008.