Exhibition IVIaking

Making and organising exhibitions for others is essential in the lives of artists.

Exhibition IVIaking outlines a collaborative approach to conceptualising and organising solo or group shows, successively as a part of the teams at Silicon IVIalley, DOC! and LUMA Arles.

2023

Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive Chapter 3: Agnès Varda
A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day
LUMA Arles

Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive Chapter 1: Édouard Glissant
Where all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another
LUMA Westbau

2022

Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive Chapter 2: Etel Adnan
The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.
LUMA Arles

2021

Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive Chapter 1: Édouard Glissant
Where all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another
LUMA Arles

2020

DEMANDS & SUPPLIES
Matthieu Laurette
Silicon IVIalley

2018

On Italian Museography...
EPFL Studio Master I
Silicon IVIalley

Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
Pierre Joseph
DOC!

Ending Explained
ECAL Master of Arts HES-SO in Fine Arts
DOC!

2017

Road Rage
Christophe Lemaitre
DOC!

La Nuit juste avant les forêts
DOC!

BREAK (FEAST)
Lauren Coullard
Silicon IVIalley

So Leggere
Francesco Cagnin
DOC!

free time
Demelza Watts
Silicon IVIalley

2016

Guitars
Francis Baudevin
DOC!

Cluster
César Chevalier & Noémie Vulpian
Silicon IVIalley

Rob a Robe
DOC!

Suite
Nicolas Degrange
Silicon IVIalley

2015

1
Robin Lebey
Silicon IVIalley

Guitare, Tanpura & Tabla électronique
Myriam Stamoulis
Silicon IVIalley

CCI
Silicon IVIalley

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 3: Agnès Varda
A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day
Adel Abdessemed
Nairy Baghramian
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Douglas Gordon
Katharina Grosse
JR
Annette Messager
Laure Prouvost
Agnès Varda

01.07.2023—2024
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Senior Advisor), Arthur Fouray (Archivist and Curator) in close collaboration with Rosalie Varda
With the assistance of Lucas Jacques-Witz (Assistant Curator & Archivist)

LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/agnes-varda-un-jour-sans-voir-un-arbre-est-un-jour-perdu
Photographs: Arthur Fouray

‘A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day’
Agnès Varda, June 2013

At the heart of the third chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive at LUMA Arles lies his encounter with Agnès Varda (1928-2019). As a filmmaker, feminist, and pioneering artist, she played a central role in the French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In her own words, Varda’s artistic trajectory spans three distinct but interconnected lives as a photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist.

The exhibition highlights Obrist’s crucial role in introducing Varda to the art world. In 1991, he travelled to Paris for a residency at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Jouy-en-Josas, invited by Jean de Loisy and Marie-Claude Beaud. Over a three-month stay, Obrist visited over 300 artist studios, averaging five per day, where he met Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, who spoke at length about Agnès Varda and the scope of her work between fiction and documentary. From that moment on, he nurtured the dream of meeting her.

In 2002, thanks to Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, Obrist finally had the opportunity to meet and film Varda at her magical house at 86 rue Daguerre, Paris. After this interview, Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, invited Agnès Varda to participate in Utopia Station, a section of the 50th Venice Biennale directed by Francesco Bonami in 2003. Varda’s proposal marked her debut as ‘an old filmmaker, but a young artist’ with the installation of her video triptych Patatutopia, which celebrates the sprouts and roots of heart-shaped potatoes. As she said: ‘I celebrate the resistance of this vegetable. I have the utopia of thinking that one can see the beauty of the world in a sprouted potato.’

After half a century of cinema, Utopia Station opened the door for Agnès Varda to explore new possibilities for engaging with multiscreen displays of moving images, multisensory experiences, and tactile elements. She continually experimented with exhibitions throughout the last 15 years of her life, as is evident in some of the unique works loaned by Rosalie Varda, Mathieu Demy, and Ciné-Tamaris. The starting point of her first major solo exhibition, L’ Île et Elle [The Island and Her], at Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 2006, was the island of Noirmoutier that she discovered thanks to Jacques Demy. Varda introduced her now iconic cinema shacks. Each shack, whose structure is made of film reels, corresponds to a film she made. The last hut she built during her lifetime, My Shack of Cinema : The Greenhouse of Le Bonheur in 2018, is on display in the Archives Gallery at LUMA Arles.

The friendship between Varda and Obrist grew through numerous interviews and projects, with Obrist attending nearly all her exhibitions and Varda participating in the Serpentine conversation marathons in London. Obrist regularly visited her on rue Daguerre, sometimes with Maja Hoffmann, with whom Varda shared a deep affinity for Arles, photography, cinema, and contemporary art. During their last meeting on March 3, 2019, Varda invited artist friends and close ones ones to participate in the making of her last work, Les Mains complices [Partnering Hands], featuring intertwined hands of couples surrounded by heart potatoes, a celebration of love.

Her spirit continues to inspire artists who crossed her path, as well as those who share her thirst for freedom, adventure, curiosity, and audacity. A vibrant testimony is provided by the eight posters created especially for this exhibition by Adel Abdessemed, Nairy Baghramian, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Katharina Grosse, JR, Annette Messager, and Laure Prouvost. Her thoughts, forever, exalt the beauty of life’s simple things: ‘A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day.’

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Arthur Fouray wish to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for archives; and extend their gratitude to Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Mustapha Bouhayati, Matthieu Humery, Christophe Danzin, Anna von Brühl, Friedrich von Brühl, and the LUMA Dream Team.

First and foremost, we wish to extend a heartfelt thank you to Rosalie Varda, Mathieu Demy, and the family of Agnès Varda; to the team of Ciné-Tamaris, especially Shérine El Sayed Taih and Jules Martin, but also Elvire Dolgorouky, Eric Leprêtre, Stanislas Biessy, Léna Cervoni; to the Nathalie Obadia Gallery, to Nathalie Obadia and her team including Marie Bernard, Agathe Cordoliani, Alizée Gex; as well as the artists who participated in the exhibition: Annette Messager and the Marian Goodman Gallery, Adel Abdessemed and his team including Lisa Rey-Galiay, Nairy Baghramian accompanied by Nicolas Hsiung, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon supported by David Sharp, Katharina Grosse and her collaborators Natalija Martinovic and Kristin Rieber, JR and his studio: Marc Azoulay, Camille Pajot, Marie-Dominique Plumejeau Tapin, and finally Laure Prouvost with the help of Mona Pouillon.

Our special thanks go to Luz Gyalui and the LUMA Arles production team, especially Alice Cattelat, Barbara Blanc, Laura Majan, Juliette Kernin, Jihye Kim; to Dimitri Bruni, Manuel Krebs, and Ludovic Varone of NORM for the layout of Agnès Varda’s Post-it notes; to Amélie Busi and the LUMA Arles communication team, Christine Denamur and Maria Luisa Rojano for the realisation of the exhibition poster and the signage; to Luana Terrasse for coordination and proofreading the texts. Many thanks also to Max Shackleton, Producer, and Lorraine Two Testro, Head of Operations and Planning for Hans Ulrich Obrist; Céline Miquelis for the installation of the cabins and cinema models; to Christophe Vallaux; to Julia Fabry; to Hervé Chandès, Pierre-Édouard Couton and the team of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain; to the Institut pour la photographie des Hauts- de-France, Lille; to the Serpentine team; to agnès b., Élodie Cazes, William Massey and the team of the Fonds de dotation agnès b.; to Charlotte Horn and Carl Davies of FACT Liverpool; to Alexander S. C. Rower and the Calder Foundation; to Sintagma, and in particular Ana Beatriz Gonçalves, Rosário Valadas Vieira and Renato Barcelos, for the subtitling of archival videos; to Jesus Plaëttner, for the mastering and audio restoration of archival videos; to Gérard Issert, Granon Digital, Paris for the digital prints; to Thibault Verdon and the IDzia team, Marc Rodrigues, Damien Poggiali, Arthur Aigon, Philippe Arnaud, Pascal Picard, for the audiovisual set up; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams, in particular Victor Jaget, Mathieu Hengevelt for the hanging, and Xavier Ressegand; Olivier Fisher for the carpentry; Florence Cuschieri and Stephanie Jabir for the condition reports; to the César Workshop for the production of model bases, Œil de Lynx for the wallpaper installation; Atelier SHL for the prints, Acoplast for the signage and label elements; and finally, to all those who have participated in the development of the exhibition, including Claire Charrier, Lucas Jacques-Witz, Koo Jeong A, Adèle Koechlin, Molly Nesbit, Chiara Parisi, Jean-François Raffalli, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Manuella Vaney and Josh Willdigg.

Index

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 1: Édouard Glissant
Where all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another
Valerio Adami
Etel Adnan
agnès b.
Miquel Barceló
Tosh Basco & Wu Tsang
Daniel Boyd
Patrick Chamoiseau
Tony Cokes
Julien Creuzet
Manthia Diawara
Melvin Edwards
Édouard Glissant
Koo Jeong A
Dozie Kanu & Precious Okoyomon
Matthew Lutz-Kinoy
Julie Mehretu
Jota Mombaça
The Otolith Group
Philippe Parreno
Raqs Media Collective
Sylvie Séma-Glissant
Asad Raza
Anri Sala

09.06—22.10.2023
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Arthur Fouray

LUMA Westbau
Schwarzescafé
Zurich, Switzerland
https://westbau.com/en/program/hans-ulrich-obrist-archive
Photographs: Nelly Rodriguez

The One-World trembles physically, geologically, mentally, spiritually, because the One-World is looking for this point, I would not say this station, but this utopian point where all the cultures of the world, all the imaginations of the world, can meet and hear one another without being dispersed or getting lost.
Édouard Glissant, Utopia Station, Venice Biennale, 2003

The first chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives is dedicated to the late Édouard Glissant (1928–2011), Martinique-born philosopher, poet and public intellectual. Glissant is an emblematic figure for both Obrist, for whom he was a mentor, and for the LUMA project in Arles, for which the thinker has been an inspiration since its inception, as for many who are finally grasping the relevance of his thought. Drawing on periods of collaboration, friendship and mentorship between the philosopher and the curator, the presentation highlights a belief they had in common: conversation and reciprocal exchange with the other can be a means to produce new realities. For Glissant, a world in transformation is a ‘One-World’ that listens and learns from each of its unique voices.

Obrist’s encounter with Glissant influenced the direction of his work for years to come. He was first introduced to the philosopher’s thinking through the artist Alighiero Boetti, whom he met after turning eighteen in 1986. Throughout the second half of the 1990s, he got to know Glissant in the company of their mutual friend Agnès B. Their companionship started in Parisian cafés, and these meetings quickly became regular events. During this period, Obrist adopted a daily fifteen-minute ritual of reading the writings of the poet-philosopher, a habit that he still practises. Their relationship was driven by a spontaneity that enabled them to collaborate on a dozen public conversations, interviews and printed materials. These projects led them to travel together across cities, continents and archipelagos.

Glissant’s philosophy of ‘Relation’ is rooted in the history and the geography of the Antilles Archipelago. Through constant exchanges from one island to another, the archipelago has provided the matrix for creolisation, a process of continual fusion that does not cause the loss of cultural and linguistic diversity but enriches it through hybridisation. The most tangible outcome to emerge from this context is creole languages, resulting from miscegenation and osmosis between vernaculars. While continental thinking relies on systems, and claims the absoluteness of its own worldview, archipelagic thinking recognises and furthers the world’s diversity. Glissant realised early on the dangers of globalisation, the homogenising engine behind the disappearance of cultural, linguistic, and ecological diversity, as well as the dangers of the populist counter-current to globalisation, namely new forms of nationalism and localism that refuse solidarity. To resist globalisation without denying globality, he coined the notion of Mondialité as a plea for a continuous worldwide dialogue that equally encouraged the mixing of cultures and celebration of local identities. Obrist’s curatorial projects are directly inspired by this concept of Mondialité as a perpetual process of relating.

The focus of this presentation is a collection of audio-visual material related to Glissant from Obrist’s Interview Archive, which was displayed for the first time on the occasion of the overall opening of LUMA in Arles in 2021. More than six hours of video material from public and private interviews, screened on eight viewing stations, allow visitors to listen to Glissant engaging in dialogues, reading his poetry aloud, forming and shaping his thoughts and philosophy while speaking. In addition to the videos, various other archival materials such as books dedicated to Obrist by Glissant are presented to offer a unique overview of this inspiring relationship. The presentation at LUMA Westbau also features a series of posters by contemporary artists, who were either close to Glissant or who feel connected to his thinking. It is through their unique language that Glissant’s ideas find prolongation, reflecting their contemporaneity and urgency.

Throughout his career, Obrist has been committed to making Glissant’s thinking accessible, quoting him at every opportunity and orchestrating numerous events, exhibitions, and publications dedicated to him. The second presentation of this exhibition at LUMA Westbau delves deeper into Obrist’s relationship with French philosopher-poet Édouard Glissant, whose vision of the 21st century art institution as an archipelago that would accommodate networks of interrelations between people, traditions and disciplines has been an inspiration for the LUMA project in Arles since its conception. Glissant had imagined the institutions of the future as places of dialogue where various parts of the world would come into contact with others. For him, what mattered was the production of reality, the transformation of theories and poetry into concrete engagements to respond to the problems of the moment. His utopia was a quivering place that transcended established systems and perpetually reinvented itself. This presentation aims to give historical and artistic consistency to the dream shared by Glissant and Obrist of a ‘utopian point where all the world’s cultures and all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another’.

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist and Arthur Fouray wish to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for archives; and also thank Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Mustapha Bouhayati, Anna von Brühl, Sandra Roemermann, Friedrich von Brühl and the LUMA dream team.

Above all, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Sylvie Séma-Glissant and the family of Édouard Glissant, including their son Mathieu Glissant, as well as the artists who participated in the first chapter of the archive at LUMA Westbau: Valerio Adami, the late Etel Adnan, agnès b., Miquel Barceló, Tosh Basco & Wu Tsang, Daniel Boyd, Patrick Chamoiseau, Tony Cokes, Julien Creuzet, Manthia Diawara, Melvin Edwards, Koo Jeong A, Dozie Kanu & Precious Okoyomon, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Julie Mehretu, Jota Mombaça, The Otolith Group, Philippe Parreno, Raqs Media Collective, Asad Raza, and Anri Sala.

Our special thanks go to Dimitri Bruni, Manuel Krebs, and Ludovic Varone of NORM for arranging the artists’ posters, Christine Denamur for the exhibition poster, and Anne Stock for the lithography of the artists’ posters. A big thank you also goes to Samuel Thomas for the editing of the archive videos; to the Sintagma team, especially Renato Barcelos and Rosário Valadas Vieira, for the subtitling of the archive videos; to Jean-Baptiste Marcant for the sound mastering of the archive videos, to Vincent Teuscher, Pascal Häusermann, Nico Canzoniere, and the entire exhibition installation team, without whom this presentation would not have been possible.

Finally, we would like to thank all the people who participated in
the development of the presentation, especially Manuela Lucadazio and the Venice Biennale team, the Serpentine Galleries team, and the Fonds de dotation agnès b. team, particularly Élodie Cazes and William Massey, but also Matthieu Humery, Lucas Jacques-Witz, Adèle Koechlin, Molly Nesbit, Carrie Pilto, Gianluigi Ricuperati, Max Shackleton, and Lorraine Two Testro.

Index

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 2: Etel Adnan
The world needs togetherness, not separation. Love, not suspicion. A common future, not isolation.
Etel Adnan
Simone Fattal

02.07.2022—29.05.2023
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Senior Advisor), Arthur Fouray (Archivist and Curator)
With the assistance of Lucas Jacques-Witz (Assistant Curator and Archivist), Victoria Kloch (Living Archives intern)

LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/archives-de-hans-ulrich-obrist-etel-adnan

Photographs: Joana Luz, Arthur Fouray (editing)

‘The world needs
togetherness, not
separation. Love,
not suspicion.
A common future,
not isolation.’
Etel Adnan, June 2016

‘Ever Etel
Ever Adnan’
Hans Ulrich Obrist, February 2021

A leporello exhibited in Dubai in 2007 catalysed Hans Ulrich Obrist’s long-term collaboration and friendship with the late Etel Adnan, one of the greatest poets and artists of our time. Obrist was magnetically drawn to the cosmic energy of her work and he read and archived every publication he found. The first he read was Sitt Marie Rose (The Post-Apollo Press, 1977), her magnum opus on the Lebanese Civil War, which established Adnan as a significant political writer and one of the preeminent voices of feminist and peace movements.

Seeing her work then evoked in Obrist a similar feeling to discovering Paul Klee’s work as a teenager. Like Klee, Adnan was a polymath. Her practice could be linked to the superstring theory; a Gesamtkunstwerk that has many dimensions and expands the notion of single disciplines: cartographies, drawings, films, notebooks, novels, paintings, plays, poems, political journalism, sculptures, tapestries, and teaching.

Born in Beirut in 1925, Adnan studied at Sorbonne and Harvard, after which she taught philosophy at the University and started painting in the late 1950s in California. There, she fell in love with her life partner Simone Fattal as well as a mountain, Mount Tamalpais, at the foot of which they lived. Her passion led to numerous paintings and the book Journey to Mount Tamalpais (The Post-Apollo Press, 1986). Often stemming from a red square shape, her canvases are abstract compositions with flat colours directly applied from the tubes. She was interested in the immediate beauty of colour. As Simone Fattal explains, her paintings both ‘exude energy and give energy. They grow on you like talismans.’

Her unrealised project of becoming an architect can be compared to how she approached painting as something that is built. Adnan understood painting as addressing itself to the outside world and architecture as inescapable, something that is always already there and made for us to be. As she said, ‘The first architecture for a human being is their mother’s womb.’

It was under heavy rain, during the winter of 2012, that Etel Adnan, Simone Fattal, Koo Jeong A, and Hans Ulrich Obrist found refuge in a café in Brittany. Throughout long conversations, Adnan was writing poems on a notepad. It became evident to Obrist that it was important to celebrate handwriting as opposed to the lamentation of its disappearing. Since then, he shares the handwritten notes of the people he meets on Instagram once a day.

After a first chapter dedicated to Édouard Glissant, the second chapter of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s archive focuses on the myriad of conversations held with Etel Adnan from 2009 until her last days in 2021, comprising fifteen hours of unreleased interviews, tracing their relation through hundreds of published documents, Post-it notes, handwritten correspondences, and artworks. Their connection was one of mutual respect and, above all, wholehearted admiration. They shared numberless projects; she was a regular participant of the Marathon conversations, organised yearly by Obrist at the Serpentine, London; he has also devoted two major solo exhibitions to her practice and published multiple monographs about her work. Adnan is an essential figure for LUMA Arles, a project Hans Ulrich Obrist has accompanied since its inception. Maja Hoffmann, founder of LUMA, remembers: ‘Etel once told me, what we are doing with LUMA is creating a lighthouse for the Mediterranean. If LUMA is the lighthouse, then Etel is certainly the fire, the fire that lights up the space and shows directions.’

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist would like to thank Maja Hoffmann for her vision and passion for the archives; Mustapha Bouhayati, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Matthieu Humery and all the LUMA team; Arthur Fouray, who organised and co-curated the Etel Adnan archives project with Lucas Jacques-Witz and the help of Victoria Kloch; Luz Gyalui and the production team, in particular Clément Château and Barbara Blanc; all the teams who made this project possible, in particular Claire Charrier; last but not least Anna von Brühl and Friedrich von Brühl. Hans Ulrich Obrist wishes to express its gratitude to Simone Fattal and the relatives of Etel Adnan; and also all those who participated in the preparation of this project; Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Bruni and the NORM team, Max Shackleton, Producer and Lorraine Two Testro, Head of Operations and Planning to Hans Ulrich Obrist; the Serpentine team, especially Claude Adjil, Rose Dempsey, Fiona Glen, Kostas Stasinopoulos; Joe Hage and the Heni team, especially Mary Zantiris, Hervé Chandès, Pierre-Édouard Couton and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain team, John McGrath, Kwong Lee and the Manchester Internation Festival team, Samuel Thomas for the editing of the archive videos; the Sintagma team, especially Rosário Valadas Vieira et Ana Gonçalves, for the subtitling of the archive videos; Jesus Plaëttner, for the mastering and audio restauration of the archive videos; the IDzia team for the audio-visual devices; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams; and finally, to all the people who participated in the elaboration of the presentation, especially Koo Jeong A, Chiara Parisi and Manuella Vaney.

Index

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives Chapter 1: Édouard Glissant
Where all the world’s imaginations can meet and hear one another
Etel Adnan
agnès b.
Julien Creuzet
Manthia Diawara
Édouard Glissant
Julie Mehretu
The Otolith Group
Sylvie Séma-Glissant
Asad Raza

26.06.2021—24.04.2022
Co-curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Artistic Director), Arthur Fouray (Junior Archivist and Curator)
With the assistance of Elif Kulözü (Living Archives Intern)

LUMA Arles
Living Archives Programme
Arles, France
https://www.luma.org/en/arles/our-program/event/archives-de-hans-ulrich-obrist-etel-adnan

Hans Ulrich Obrist Archives

The Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 21 May 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland) Archives documents his curatorial and conversational practice. Since the late 1980s, the Swiss-born curator has been developing a multifaceted practice that is shaped, first and foremost, through interactions. His archive is about listening, since it contains a multitude of encounters with some of the most influential figures of our times.

In 1986, Obrist visited the studio of Peter Fischli & David Weiss in Zurich, on the eve of the production of their film Der Lauf der Dinge [The Way Things Go, 1987], featuring a series of chain reactions involving ordinary objects set in motion where one thing leads to another. From this meeting onwards, he began visiting artists’ studios, travelling by night train, each encounter leading to another, each artist sending him to others. This is how in 1987 he visited the studio of Alighiero Boetti in Rome, a momentous meeting during which the artist gave him certain tasks. The most famous of these was to ask artists about their unrealised projects, which he now does in every interview.

What Obrist calls his Interview Project began in earnest in the early 1990s, when Jonas Mekas encouraged the young curator to film his conversations with artists. His first filmed interviews with artists such as Vito Acconci and Félix González-Torres date from 1991 and were shot in a TV studio as part of the Viennese project museum in progress. Afterwards, the oral historian Studs Terkel advised him to make improvised videos without using fancy equipment that could stop the flow. Etel Adnan told him later on that the 20th century was about manifestos, and that the 21st century should be more about listening. To date, the Interview Archive contains around 4,000 recorded conversations, not only with artists but also with architects, musicians, writers, filmmakers, philosophers, scientists. The wider archive consists of many other layers, such as pub- lications, photographs, handwritten and electronic correspondence, notes, sketches, drawings and projects.

This agglomeration of media and documents, which has been gradually growing since the late 1980s, first piled up in Obrist’s student apartment in St. Gallen, where he had organised in 1991 his first exhibition, Küchenausstellung (The Kitchen Show). The archive then went on the move. In 1997, the artist Joseph Grigely began the Nodes + Networks project with the archives of Obrist’s publication projects, which continues today under the umbrella of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). At the same time, the entire archive from St. Gallen was housed in the attic of the University of Lüneburg (Germany). This gave rise to the Interarchive project, which was the first time the archive was made public. In 2006, Obrist rented an apartment in Berlin to relocate the archive, which remained private until it was hosted by LUMA in Arles.

Together with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Maja Hoffmann proposed a format that reveals different aspects of the archive over time, such as a project or an encounter. At the core of these series of presentations are the documents from the Interview Archive, which, more than an accumulation of interviews, constitute an infinite conversation connecting people, cultures, languages and disciplines. The presentation format is based on a series of viewing stations consisting of monitors and SANAA-designed ‘Rabbit Ear’ chairs, reproducing the scenography conceived by the architect Kazuyo Sejima for the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale that the LUMA Foundation supported in 2010. This intimate layout was originally created for Now Interviews by Obrist and featured a series of live public interviews filmed and broadcast in situ upon the invitation of Sejima to realise a portrait of the Biennale. At the heart of each episode of this long-term project is the idea of learning to listen and listening to learn.

Acknowledgements

Hans Ulrich Obrist would like to express his sincere gratitude to Maja Hoffmann for her unfailing support throughout this project; to Vassilis Oikonomopoulos and Mustapha Bouhayati for making this project a reality; and, above all, to address a special thanks to Sylvie Séma-Glissant, and the family of Édouard Glissant, their son Mathieu Glissant; to the artists who are participating in the first chapter of the archive, Etel Adnan, agnès b., Julien Creuzet, Manthia Diawara, Julie Mehretu and her studio, especially Sarah Rentz, Philippe Parreno, Asad Raza and his studio, particularly Christopher Wierling, The Otolith Group - Anjalika Sagar, Kodwo Eshun; to all the LUMA teams without whom this presentation would not have been possible, Arthur Fouray for the coordination of the project and Elif Kulözü; Luz Gyalui and the production team, in particular Clément Château, Barbara Blanc; the communication team, especially Christine Denamur; and last but not least, Matthieu Humery, Anna von Brühl and Friedrich von Brühl for their continuous involvement; and also to all those who participated in the preparation of this project; Manuela Lucadazio and the Venice Biennale team; the Serpentine Galleries team, especially Max Shackleton; the Fonds de dotation agnès b. team, in particular William Massey; Samuel Thomas for the editing of the archive videos; the Sintagma team, especially Renato Barcelos, and Rosário Valadas Vieira for the subtitling of the archive videos; Jean-Baptiste Marcant, for the sound mastering of the archive videos; the IDzia team for the audio-visual devices; Gilles Pennegaggi and all the exhibition installation teams; and finally, to all the people who participated in the elaboration of the presentation, especially Melvin Edwards, Koo Jeong A, Molly Nesbit, Carrie Pilto, Gianluigi Ricuperati and Lorraine Two Testro.

Index

DEMANDS & SUPPLIES
Matthieu Laurette

24.08—20.09.2020
Organised by Silicon IVIalley

Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Matthieu-laurette

DEMANDS & SUPPLIES, Matthieu Laurette's first solo exhibition in Switzerland since 1999 at MAMCO in Geneva, will fill the space from floor to ceiling at Silicon Malley (2.5 x 4 meters [98 x 157.5 in]), an artist-run space hosting one visitor at a time due to the COVID-19 situation, and spread to an online sales website (www.demandsandsupplies.art), powered by Shopify™ that will be available worldwide.

Conceived as a retrospective, DEMANDS & SUPPLIES (2012—ongoing) picks up the story left off at the artist's eponymous exhibition in 2012 at Gaudel de Stampa in Paris. It presents a full financial disclosure of all costs and expenses incurred in the past eight years of Matthieu Laurette's practice as an artist.

‘Accumulator or otaku of Contemporary art, Matthieu Laurette is a demanding artist in the sense that he manages to integrate into his work all the elements or data that participate in the preparation, production, presentation, distribution, mediation, promotion and reception of his work.’ ⁽¹⁾

In contrast to Chris Burden, who made public his profit and loss (Full Financial Disclosure, 1977) as decorative "collages" of canceled checks, bank statements, tax forms which he called ‘drawings’ Matthieu Laurette is proposing since 2012, through a commercial arrangement, simple two-line contracts that allow his expenses to be acquired. Rather than producing or exhibiting a single material object, Matthieu Laurette generates financial ‘exhaust’ his bills and debts — to be paid for by collectors. Today anyone can become a collector on www.demandsandsupplies.art.

As the artist explained in a discussion with Seth Siegelaub in Frieze (2013): ‘DEMANDS & SUPPLIES, consists entirely of contracts — say, a contract that a collector could purchase the cost of my phone deals, the rent of my studio or have a dinner with me and stuff like that.’ ⁽²⁾

Matthieu Laurette considers his basic artist’s expenses as production costs that are then doubled to define the selling price of the work, ranging from 207.66 euros for Matthieu Laurette’s 2015 mobile phone bills were purchased by ____________________________, up to 31,909.14 euros for the entirety of his 2019 expenses. These works, available for online order and on-site purchase at Silicon Malley, are unique printed contracts in A4 or US letter format (dimensions variable according to collector's location), which must be signed by both parties — the collector and the artist — to be then framed in an artist's frame (size: 37.5 x 29 x3.5 cm / 14.75 x 11.25 x 1.25 in). For more details, please contact us by email or visit the website: www.demandsandsupplies.art.

Postponed due to the COVID-19 crisis, this exhibition marks the celebration of Silicon Malley's 5th anniversary and its reopening after seven months. Even though Matthieu Laurette customarily omits biographical data in his work, the artist had suggested organizing the opening reception of the exhibition on the 24th of August 2020, the very day of his 50th birthday. The project, with a ‘physical’ exhibition at Silicon Malley in Switzerland and a year-long online shop accessible to all, remains exactly the same as planned in 2019 before the pandemic. The rescheduled presentation — now appearing alongside ‘Galleries and Art Fairs Online Viewing Rooms’ and ‘Institutions generating online content’ — further calls into question the transactional nature of online visibility and critiques the ‘outsideness’ of not-for-profit culture and artists-run spaces. In so doing, the artist lays bare the mechanisms of individual consumption and existence.

In 1993, when asked on a French TV game show called Tournez Manège [The Dating Game] to describe himself, Matthieu Laurette replied, ‘A multimedia artist.’ He has since been exploring the relationship between art and society with an œuvre that he characterizes as ‘IRL Institutional Critique.’ His body of work seeks to show inconsistencies or flaws in the systems imposed by late capitalism and Spectacle.

This project reduces an artistic work to the exhaustive list of expenses necessary to its own conception. Furthermore, it questions the value that any person, including the artist himself, can place on a work, including all that it can be brought to encompass, conceal, or even disguise. Reduced to an increasingly essential data for many artists — financial data — DEMANDS & SUPPLIES displays in an orderly sequence of A4 sheets of paper on the wall, a raw look at what is the lived reality of an artist today.

Silicon IVIalley, 2020

(1) Arthur Fouray, I do not wish to add more, 2020 in Actes du Colloque Vues & Données, to be published in September 2020, ENSP, France.

(2) Vivian Sky Rehberg, The Real World in Frieze, No.154, Apr. 2013.

Matthieu Laurette Biography

Matthieu Laurette (b. 1970) participated in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 curated by Harald Szeemann, and his work has been presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim (1998), MoMA-PS1 (2005) and MoMA (2007) in New York, Stedelijk (2005) in Amsterdam, Castello di Rivoli (2001) in Turin, Mamco (1999) in Geneva, Palais de Tokyo (2003 & 2006) and the Pompidou Centre (1997, 2000, 2004, 2007 & 2009) in Paris. A retrospective of his work spanning over three decades will be held at MACVAL-Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne (Vitry-sur-Seine) in 2022.
www.laurette.net
@matthieulaurette
www.demandsandsupplies.art

Index

On Italian museography, but refrained to the site of BBPR’s Castello Sforzesco. Expressed via the means of Hans Hollein's inspired axonometries and Giotto-styled renderings with the attributes of various scale models. The whole is held togetter within the maze of a small scale private chapel.
Koenraad Dedobbeleer
Antonios Prokos
David Viladomiu
Lerna Bagdjian
Eric Bonhôte
Lois Bouche
Svenja Clausen
Noé Cuendet
Vincent Dorfmann
Florent Dubois
Floriane Fol
Fanny Frykberg Wallin
Alexandra Fuchs
Eva Hürlimann
Valentine Jaques
Valdrin Jashari
Daniela Lopes Peñaloza
Nina Mosca
Marion Moutal
Philippine Radat
Germán Ribera Marín
Valentine Robin
Felix Spangenberg
Constance Steinfels
Annabelle Thüring

18.12.2018—18.01.2019
An exhibition of the program Italians Did It Better by Koenraad Dedobbeleer at EPFL Studio Master I organised with Silicon IVIalley

Silicon IVIalley
Prilly, Switzerland
https://siliconmalley.ch/Italians-Did-It-Better

The ambition to explore the possible contrasts and interactions between serious architectural practice and contemporary art drives the energies converged during the exhibition On Italian Museography… This project bridges an EPFL research unit directed by Koenraad Dedobbeleer (a prototypal architectural firm) named Italians did it better, with an artist-run space, Silicon Malley, overseen by a group of artists in Lausanne. The outcome is a multi-layered exploration and amalgamation of two distinct reflective spaces.

Contemporary artists, due to the proliferation of ‘artist-run-spaces’ and the surge of small international galleries, have grown accustomed to working outside deliberately-designed architectural contexts, such as museums, foundations, art centers, and other institutional settings. Only the elite of this corporate ensemble have the opportunity to engage spatially with the architectures of their era. Architecture, in contrast, is most often showcased in exhibition contexts in a format that leans more towards a presentation rather than an exhibition itself. The collective aspiration to present this architectural exhibition in a space almost devoid of any architectural concept reconnects with a pragmatic democratisation of contemporary interrelations between art and architecture. The curation of this exhibition by Koenraad Dedobbeleer, an artist whose theoretical endeavours constantly oscillate between these two cultural spheres, facilitates a gentle and balanced discursive exchange, respecting the diverse cultures represented. Like its underlying structure or script, it unveils its intentions through a nested series reminiscent of Russian dolls, enabling a kaleidoscopic concentration on the academic study of the exhibition’s architectural devices. The bibliography established during the project’s development delves into these exhibition systems still largely uncharted history.

The self-titled exhibition of Herzog and de Meuron at the Centre Pompidou in 1995, co-curated by Remy Zaugg, stands as the manifest theoretical legacy of On Italian Museography… Orchestrated by an artist and his two assistant architects, Antonios Prokos and David Viladomiu, it stems from a synergy that elicits a focused, scholarly, and open investigation – specifically, an analysis and reinterpretation by Master of Architecture students regarding museum layouts created by a group of Italian architects between the 1950s and 1970s. The focal point narrows further, centring on BBPR’s iconic Castello Sforzesco (1954–1956), a hallmark of this architectural corpus. Detailed and succinct, the design of the museum’s internal spaces amalgamates the quintessential elements of these canonical presentations of European cultural legacy – in this case, a collection predominantly comprised of works from the Quattrocento, representing Italian history and the Flemish Renaissance.

This research manifests as a studiolo, a recursive representation of the exhibition space, resembling an inverted cabinet which, for each of its openings, offers a perspective, an axonometry, and a model, each corresponding to a student’s project. The inner appearance of this furniture, evoking a chapel, is adorned with a sequential display of renderings inspired by Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Church of Padua (1303–1306). This nod to the work of the artist, regarded as the progenitor of perspective in painting, forges an evident connection between artistic and architectural subjectivity. It also visually imprints a fascination akin to the order of the orthodox icon towards the classical art museum within a contemporary presentation setting, opposing any grandeur or splendour. This yet-to-be-resolved contradiction, a query directed at the observer and the visitor, frames the present-day interplays between student or professional and artistic or architectural practices, which we are tasked to invigorate.

Arthur Fouray

Index

Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles
Pierre Joseph

08.09—07.10.2018
Curated by Arthur Fouray

DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/pierre-joseph-fondation-vincent-van-gogh-arles-doc/

Press release
Pierre_Joseph_Fondation_Vincent_van_Gogh_Arles_DOC.pdf

Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu

Pierre Joseph (born 1965 in Caen, lives and works in Paris) shares at DOC a simple story. The Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles exhibition positions itself in the tradition of the rural life scenes painted in the 19th century by Vincent van Gogh and Jean-Francois Millet. Following the Hypernormandie exhibition at La Galerie Noisy-le-Sec in 2016, the artist explores the almost science-fiction continuation of the Impressionists’ work.

He hijacks the keywords and labels, confusing everything while clarifying the themes of his solo exhibition. He plays with the codes of a hierarchical technological society with normative mythologies obsessed by an organic, natural ideal. He notably focused on the exhibition La Vie Simple – Simply Life/Songs of Alienation by Bice Curiger and Julia Marchand at the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles in 2018. La Vie Simple seeks to decipher artists’ relationship with a lifestyle in harmony with nature. Moving from a real context to a temporary exhibition, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles sets the tone.

Are we on rue du Docteur Fanton or rue du Docteur Potain ? This keyword shift, here a ground shift, leads us into a potato field. A 21st-century version of a potato field. Storage, industrial display of potatoes, Fondation Vincent Van Gogh Arles takes us to an aisle in Rungis. This presentation, almost communist in the deliberate consistency of the photographs and their subject, conveys the idea of a simple potato, devoid or rather peeled of all qualifiers. A few sprouts here and there, and the pinkish hue of their film sometimes punctuate the dry soil surrounding them. In this cosmos of potatoes, the tiny details are so many anchor points to return to and emphasise a simple truth: they are potatoes.

How to simplify the message of any political, social, ideological, or historical issue to arrive at expressing the humble object ‘potato’? Pierre Joseph delves into the perspective of a simple potato. Re-discovering the direct and trivial attitude 19th-century painters might have had while painting peasants, fields, meals, and still lifes. The task is not so straightforward with such an overflow of current information. One only needs to search for the hashtags ‘#potato’, ‘#potatoes’ (and all their variants, including in Esperanto) on social networks or search engines to realise the richness and diversity of the starch’s visual vocabulary. The exhibition, moreover, is constructed with and thanks to the potato. From the starch that fixes the image on film to the starch glue binding the forty-five ‘endless photographs’ to the DOC wall. It is about narrowing the vocabulary to discern precise categories and clear intentions.

The potato, seriality, contextual shift. All these components mix and naturally constitute the exhibition experience in an extended spatio-temporal framework. Today or in 10 years, here or elsewhere, Pierre Joseph presents us with a living ecosystem that has evolved since the project’s inception, expressed during the exhibition’s duration, and will change tomorrow with time.

Arthur Fouray

Jean–François Millet : Pop down up

Jean–François Millet accesses history’s arena by many entries. The most famous comes from Vincent van Gogh, who devotes a fraternal, even paternal worship to Millet ⁽¹⁾. In this complete and surprising lineage, a ‘nineteenth–century look’ appears in the colour ‘translation’ from the Dutch painter. This look is focused on images, which start being industrialised and coloured in front of the stingy eyes of newcomers, collectors and connoisseurs, among which reigns the van Gogh pair – Vincent and Théo. The last is pegged to one of the vital parts behind the new pictures’ culture, which gradually settles during the second half of the XIXth century. The Goupil House, as others, feeds its enthusiasts with photographic copies and luxurious coloured engravings. Reproductions, drawings, originals, they parade between fingers of our dear Vincent, soon aspiring artist, who decides then to refine his eyes at the heart of image making ⁽²⁾. From London in 1874, he writes and answers to the passion surrounding L’Angélus (1857–1859). Also a pleased victim of ‘Aura’s migration’ ⁽³⁾, van Gogh experiences the masterpiece through the many reproductions that conform to the new uses of fresh collectors. A picture for each and for all those who love to free images from portfolios to spread them across salon’s walls. On a simple card, between two glasses, or simply pinned, the reproduction shows off its new powers and narrates the glory of photomechanical processes ⁽⁴⁾. These popular hangings foretell a ‘pop’ ⁽⁵⁾ sensibility and fever that culminates, a century later, in the Anglo–Saxon’s world. This boiling world of images moulds a ‘nineteenth–century look’ that welcomes the countryside’s wealthy man, the peasant–painter, Gruchy’s native and School of Barbizon’s regular.

Jean–François Millet is a man of his time, skilled at handling pre–programs and tricks. In his own way, he engages in media celebrity, through, among others, a postcard. From 1863, he authorises the reproduction and diffusion of L’homme à la houe and modulates the palette of his paintings with the help of their photographic copies. The by–product dictates the original in this mail orders’ game. The image has to be seductive at first glance. The new works available to purchase from the French territory display an assumed contrast and a silhouette’s play for the one observing from the United States. Millet is known to Americans. His brother lives there and generates for him an ongoing platform thanks to pre–sale photographs. The man from the fields is a man of his time, of its expectations, and of its pre–sales, even of its turmoils which would drag him to the hectic flows of small and major History. The ‘peasant’s painter’ lost some strings.

His outdoor work gestures put up the perfect green screen for those who like to see a rural France nostalgia in the wake of France’s defeat in 1870 ⁽⁶⁾ – a lowliness sometimes tinted with arrogance in the peasant’s demeanours ⁽⁷⁾, or even the exact reverse: a politically unstable small nation. Towards this catalogue of fantasies, Millet claims a non–political work that treats the peasant’s class with realism and kindness. The ‘nineteenth–century look’ is paired with a ‘native look’ that depicts rurality from within: a pioneer of the ‘rural informing’. One of his most famous paintings – L’Angélus – vacates France with great fanfare due to an important opinion warp going public during the sale on July 1st, 1889. Kneaded from different wishes against the mysterious painting, the government cannot find an agreement to keep the artwork on its land. L’Angélus leaves for the other side of the Atlantic, leading to
a national loss feeling and shared humiliation. The picture returns as a palliative care : edited and distributed in large numbers, prints are scattered throughout the French territory, complementing the illustrations’ panel already circulating between fingers of our dear Vincent. ‘Migration’s Aura’ helps to dry the national tears while the two peasants, the bell tower and their small harvest move on to the Louvre in 1909. Does it make its myth tragic (8) ? It is, at the very least, caustic, mechanical and resolutely modern, abundant and pre–pop.

Julia Marchand

(1) Vincent van Gogh, n° 493 letter (Nuenen, 1885) ‘Millet, he’s Millet the father, which means he’s a guide & advisor for young painters.’
(2) Goupil’s house business unit in London
(3) Latour B., Lowe A., 2011. ‘Aura’s migration or how to explore an original via its facsimile’ in Intermédialités n° 17 Spring 2011 pp. 173–205
(4) Renié, P–L., 2006. ‘The Image on the Wall: Prints as Decoration in Nineteenth–Century Interiors’ in Nineteeth–Century Art Worldwide [Online] http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/autumn06/49-autumn06/autumn06article/156-the-image-on-the-wall-prints-as-decoration-in-nineteenth-century-interiors [viewed on June the 22nd 2017].
(5) For further information, see Van Gogh : Pré–pop symposium acts initiated by Bice Curiger, Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles Art Director, 2017
(6) see Georgel, C., ‘The Peasant gets into history’, HPI [Online] https://www.histoire-image.org/fr/etudes/paysan-entre-histoire [viewed on June the 15th 2017].
(7) ‘Baudelaire thinks Millet’s humility is close to pride : His peasants are prigs who have a too high self esteem. They spread a fatal, dark, drowsiness which urges me to hate them.’ Quote by Isolde Pludermacher in ‘L’Angélus de Millet : du souvenir personnel à la mémoire collective’ in Millet (exhibition publication), Palais des Beaux–Arts de Lille, 2018. p. 40
(8) Salvador Dali the tragical myth of ‘L’Angélus de Millet’, paranoïa–critic lecture, Paris, Jean–Jacques Pauvert, 1963.

Potatoes Love Treaty

Our first culinary thrills were with you. Do you remember?

As children, we devoured you as mashed potatoes on Sunday noon. You were named Amandine, and once on our plates, we would carve a well in your centre to pour in the juice of our roast.

A few years later, when we were at the age to fry you, you adopted the name Charlotte. Luckily for us, during the time of our first encounter in 2011, you lost your license and became free. No more royalties paid to the giants of this world. You had just turned thirty and could finally enjoy a bit of tranquillity. Now, you are free to embrace any farmer, provided he treats you with tenderness.

In April, you experience his caresses before he buries you under a soft bed of soil. Often, you remain hidden there for over four months. Sometimes, early in June, you grant us the privilege of tasting your flesh. Your skin is then so delicate that a mere touch is enough to peel you. Cooking you is child’s play.

Then comes the end of summer; your skin is toughened by the sun and rainless days. It then becomes more challenging to retrieve you. We might have to dig and try up to three times before we can hold you again. Yet, you are less slender than before. Your curves are more pronounced.

In a few months, the days of your beauty will be past. Your skin will wrinkle. You will begin to show your claws, ready to depart. You prepare for the grand journey, one that will reunite you with the love of your life, the earth. The very one that lives, breathes, and sustains us all.

We’ve grown accustomed to your fleeting nature. We never part in anger, for you never truly leave us.

Your sisters are there to comfort us. They, too, are free, and we will have all the time to cherish them. Anaïs, Bernadette, Blanche, Désirée… Why savour the same one every day when nature is so diverse?

By Norbert Nicolet (farmer, La Ferme ô VR, Annoville) and Jill Cousin (gastronomic journalist), lovers and enthusiasts of all potatoes: white, pink, purple, to mash, to nurture for hours in a pot, or to fry in hot oil. What matters is that the large agricultural cooperatives no longer bind them, and we can savour them as much as we wish.

Pierre Joseph
Born in 1965 in Caen. Lives & works in Paris.

Since the late ’80s, Pierre Joseph’s work has focused on issues of his presence. He began his artistic practice with collective projects in collaboration with Philippe Perrin, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, and Bernard Joisten. He first gained recognition with Les Ateliers du Paradise, the now-historical inaugural exhibition held at Air de Paris in Nice in 1990. In the early ’90s, he began his series of ‘characters to reactivate’, derived from contemporary mythologies (examples include Superman, Snow White, a policeman, and Pris Stratton from Blade Runner). These characters are present during the exhibition’s opening and can be subsequently reactivated using documentary photography.

After a 3-month trip to Japan in 1997, he shifted his focus to the concept of learning. In the ’00s, he developed a keen interest in the theme of his disappearance. More recently, he has been blending keywords and superimposing layers of content. His most recent solo exhibition at Air de Paris in January 2018 featured photographs that resemble the watercolours of botanist Pierre-Joseph Redouté. Pierre Joseph thus merges the hashtags associated with both of their visual practices.

Pierre Joseph has exhibited widely in Europe and internationally. His works are part of collections at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Van Abbe Museum, and numerous private collections. Recent exhibitions include those at Le Consortium, MAC/VAL, Dallas Biennial, Centre Pompidou Metz, Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, LUMA Westbau, and Swiss Institute.

Index

Ending Explained
Anaïs Aik
Will Benedict
Daniele Bonini
Stefania Carlotti
Loucia Carlier
Sara Cavicchioli
Raquel Dias
Caterina De Nicola
Pauline Forté
Emilie Fradella
Magdalena Froger
Charlie Gay
Catherine Heeb
Lorenza Longhi
Léa Jullien
Mandine Knöpfel
Una Björg Magnúsdóttir
Julie Monot
Agathe Naito
Jérôme Pfister
Alessandro Polo
Marco Rigoni
Hélène Spycher
Jeanne Wéry

17.03 — 09.04.2018
An exhibition organised by Will Benedict with the students of the Master's program from ECAL/Ecole cantonale d'art de Lausanne (ECAL Master of Arts HES-SO in Fine Arts — EAE European Art Ensemble).

DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/ending-explained/
https://ecal.ch/fr/feed/events/1195/ending-explained/

Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu

The artist and professor Will Benedict suggested a precise set of rules to the students of the European Art Ensemble Master for their exhibition at DOC!: to each produce a poster imitating and commenting on Internet meme culture. A collection of sculptures made by the students face the corpus of posters hanging on the wall.

‘In contrast to designers, artists have a more ambiguous relationship to efficiency. In design the primary condition of production is the client. But who does the artist work for and to what end? The collector? The audience? Humans? The market regulates the practical and emotional realities of this classic division rather poorly. The market does a lot rather poorly. 50 or 100 years ago artists, designers, performers, writers and poets attempted to breakdown some of the more arbitrary distinctions that hold a genre together. Today we cling to them in the midst of Brexit and Trump; Angela Merkel is our hero and the French have finally decided to take their flirtation with neoliberalism to the next level. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall.’

WIll Benedict

A program by Arthur Fouray

Index

Road Rage
Christophe Lemaitre among Mimosa Echard, Kim Farkas, Aurélien Mole

25.11—17.12.2017
Organised by Corentin Canesson, Arthur Fouray & Eva Vaslamatzi

DOC!
Paris, France
https://doc.work/event/driver-angst-christophe-lemaitre/

Photographs: Aurélien Mole
Graphic design: Baldinger·Vu-Huu

As he told Édouard Vuillard, Maurice Denis (1870-1943) would rather succeed in painting ‘sky red’ pieces than painting ‘red skies’ over and over. That is how, in tune with modernity, the Nabi painter expressed his wish for a reversal of substance and quality. If a given thing, such as a dress, is regarded as substance (’a little more than something’) endowed with a quality as its color for instance (’a little less than something’), one must consider, conversely, that a blue dress is not a blue dress, but that the color blue may be “dress”: a substance-blue, one possible quality of which is to be “dress”. Maurice Denis’s brief remark elegantly spells out an important idea – one in which a large number of attributes of things do not derive from them but, on the contrary, precede and produce them. Locomotion is not an attribute of the dog, nor of man, quite the contrary. Locomotion is actually what has developed and expanded through a multitude of differentiated compositions – biped ones here, quadruped ones there – within the particular conditions of their environment. In other words, locomotion is a product of nature, hierarchically superior to the animal – a form of unlocated energy dissipation of the living, of which each animal is a varying qualitative expression. The question consists in choosing the degree of reality.

Acknowledgements: Garance Chabert, Arthur Fouray, Julien Jassaud, Alexis Tolmatchev, la Villa du Parc (Centre d’art contemporain)