Les Bons Génies de la vie domestique

Beaubourg takes on the allure of a folk museum as the tools and gadgetry that have transformed domestic life since 1900 replace a shadowy display of primitive pots and instruments. Arranged in roughly chronological style-groups come irons, fires, electric fans, washing and sewing machines, cameras and TVs, hairdryers and telephones and gramophones, alongside pieces of archive footage and some superb advertising posters. All fun enough, but it sorely lacks a few pointers - which were the innovative ones, the first, the most technical, the best-sellers, the failures - to render the sheer cacophony of objects more intelligible.

Snap Me One! African Studio Photography 1950-2000

This fascinating exhibition covers 50 years of studio photography from West and East Africa. It is filled with remarkable - and often surreal - social documents. In general, these portraits feature an obsessively laid-out set meant to reflect how the subjects wanted to be regarded. Any blemishes were carefully retouched and added to the sense of the unreal, a sense that was further amplified in the 1980s when photographers went over-the-top in order to compete with the emergence of affordable colour photography.