The Coral Sea Room

In 2008, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented Land 250, a solo exhibition of artist and musician Patti Smith, which revealed the many facets of her artistic production: photographs taken with her old Polaroid Land 250 camera, lms, and her personal a nities with certain important French literary gures. In that exhibition, Patti Smith presented The Coral Sea Room, an installation in which she paid tribute
to the artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989 and who was one of her closest friends and mentors. This installation consists of a poem by Patti Smith, a soundtrack created with Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine), and a dual projection of powerful images of nature, shot by lmmaker Jem Cohen under Patti Smith’s direction. “After his death, I wanted to o er him something else other than tears, so I wrote the ‘Coral Sea,’” explains Patti Smith about Robert Mapplethorpe.