The group exhibition Gravity Ease Contract, curated by David Douard, brings together artists who tell intimate stories that draw on their own experiences and focus on the outside world, as if seen through the cracks in their very own private rooms. From this perspective, the artists capture echoes of the outside world, such as music, videos, and fragments of popular culture, which seep through the walls and invade their daily lives.

Although reality and the news are only present in the form of crackling fragments, presented for themselves without additional commentary, they attempt to make an incision in the exhibition. In response to this confrontational reality, chimeras, creatures, and avatars emerge and are projected outward—beings that seem to come to life and bear witness to a unique relationship with the world; an imaginary metamorphosis that corrupts reality as an act of political resistance.

Identity is expressed through both the contemplation of thoughts in motion and a body filled with density and gravity, searching for balance. This reveals a multiplicity, whether embodied or expressed metaphorically through doppelgängers, ventriloquists, or puppets. This relationship weaves reflections on architecture and lifestyles, on what constitutes a refuge, a nest, or a threshold, and on what protects us from the outside. It reveals something dormant: a latent presence in the midst of transformation.

Featuring:

Nils Alix-Tabeling, Emmanuel Beguinot, Ellen Cantor, Dennis Cooper, Stephan Dillemuth, Rochelle Goldberg, Estelle Hanania, Richard Hawkins, Agata Ingarden, Mélanie Matranga, Rafael Moreno, Jean-Luc Moulène, Rolf Nowotny, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel, Susan Philipsz, Julia Scher, Erwan Sene, Akeem Smith, Naoki Sutter-Shudo.

Scenography by Celeste Burlina.

at the tip of the nails a plastic flower is growing

underneath and

makes t drip

laundry

detergent that hides organized larvaes/ the party

retouchd avatars

w big clothin proudly perforated dance

the emotions as colouring,

secretly fabricating the future of kings

innocent

everywhere they reclaimin

the head warm, the bodis

dried.

alwz movin. not knowin and

that the only time is

the hair the smell of distrust

alredy at age 6. the world

the way we like t.

the world of stars and wire

fences.

the same taste

, daily. dodge,

give it all u got.

dried, seated

has swallowd back

nothing belongs

to them, but everything.

the salt of th sea.

the sun

n the chin up. flies

when walking

astray. 2 the solid anchor

pasta

and candy

chlorine n fishing hooks.

th smell of rat and shaved nape

the tired forehead

the

smile hidden within truth.

like something written deep inside my muscles

written with knottd threads

its useless but its food 4 thoght

i was spinning around on my axis and saw thousand

f angels draw their blu crossbow

n as a constellation

a fw millimetrs

from the ground now

2 think

abt ownin nothing

but alwz wanting 2 touch t all

« Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty », la première exposition organisée par David Douard en tant que commissaire dans une institution, réunit des artistes de différentes générations et aux pratiques diverses. Des artistes qui appartiennent à un cercle plus large et cependant remarquable par le fait que leur production artistique — qu’elle se décline sous forme d’objets quasi ready-made, de pièces sonores, de mobilier, de sculptures, de peintures ou de photographies — a, depuis de nombreuses années parfois, influencé le travail et la sensibilité de celui qui s’est fait connaître par le biais d’installations traversées par un puissant rapport au réel. S’il n’est pas inédit de voir apparaître, au sein de la pratique de David Douard, ce lien spécifique entretenu à l’œuvre de ses pairs^₁, l’exposition dont nous lui avons confié la réalisation permet de rendre compte de la manière dont une certaine « énergie » de création se diffuse sous la forme d’un environnement singulier de proximités et d’influences.

« Énergies », le terme est directement extrait d’un entretien que nous avons réalisé avec l’artiste en amont de l’ouverture de l’exposition. Il dit avec justesse ce qui s’apparente moins à une méthodologie qu’à un modus operandi essentiel dans sa pratique, qui s’est depuis le départ construite dans une correspondance évidente avec le monde qui l’entoure. Tout y est en effet affaire de circulation et de transformation, d’absorption et d’adresse. Nous nous sommes de notre côté laissés emporter par cette forme entropique de collaboration pour suivre avec lui les différents embranchements d’un projet qui s’est depuis son point initial construit par résonance et capillarité. Il convient d’ailleurs ici d’en restituer quelques éléments de genèse, et d’évoquer l’impulsion du duo de graphistes Thomas Bizzarri et Alain Rodriguez, qui nous ont présenté, en début d’année 2023, un projet d’édition articulé autour des fanzines réalisés par David Douard depuis ses premières années d’étude aux beaux-arts. C’est à ce moment que nous avons pris la mesure de la dimension collective de son travail, qui à sa marge la moins visible — là où le geste est le plus fragile et modeste, mais certainement le plus spontané aussi — donnait à l’activité plastique une incarnation plus hybride que celle qu’on lui connaissait.

L’exposition qui se prépare dans nos murs est, de notre point de vue, le prolongement de ce mouvement jusqu’alors contenu dans l’intimité de l’atelier. Elle informe la pratique de l’artiste autant qu’elle nous donne accès au langage de celles et ceux qui l’accompagnent dans cette nouvelle étape de son parcours. Spécifiquement imaginée pour l’occasion, la scénographie revisite certains dispositifs récents apparus dans son travail et y agit comme une matrice formelle. Ménageant autant de rapprochements que de perspectives distanciées, elle génère des projections concrètes et symboliques entre les pièces exposées tout autant qu’avec l’espace physique de la fondation et son environnement immédiat. Encapsulant ces imaginaires dissociés sans pour autant céder à une quelconque tentation narrative, cette exposition où se croisent de multiples affects place en son centre l’activité artistique comme un moyen permettant « d’altérer l’autorité du monde² ».

Thanasis Totsikas’ second exhibition with the gallery, entitled Nature, My Home, marks a new cycle of exhibitions, through which artists’ relationships are developed through their work and the artistic process itself. This coincides with Liliana Moro’s first exhibition in London and Piraeus, In No Time, and the first presentation of her work in Greece. A very important moment for the gallery, the global representation of the artist who was born, lives and works in Milan.

At the same time, the exhibition of new collages on paper and new works of mixed materials by David Douard, entitled aura vamp’block’r, along with a text-spell by the artist, is presented in the corner space. Moro and Totsikas come from different places and landscapes; diverse schools and teachings define their work. They live lives in and out of architectures that some would call incomparable. Their works address with unique sensitivity on existential issues about human nature, and by using materials with supreme awareness and in a unique way each work, they bring us back to a realm that seems primordial and ephemeral, earthly, and therefore rather cosmic.

When you walk in Totsikas’ field, you balance.
First, you discover the balance of your own body, which finds under the sole of its shoe metal, soil and grass, other organic materials in the process of rotting, that he has discarded after consuming them, pieces of marble, tires, various plastic objects and too many cigarette butts.
The second balance you discover is that of life oscillating between the natural and that which is human-made. Probably the hardest and most delicate balance. And you’re left there, floating between the natural and the human, if that’s something that can be considered unnatural.

Entering space I from Polidefkous street, you walk on the work “ ” by Liliana Moro.A work-condition that the artist – and those who faithfully follow her around the world – discover together in different architectural, and not only, adventures. And it was inevitable for us, especially today, not to open our doors again, inviting our audience to a collective sonic choreography, that although contemporary psychoanalysts have mapped and characterised its image as risky, (we dare) to be together on this perpetual condition of balance between safety and danger, on this work that, as long as it exists in space, will be activated only by our presence, and its sound by our weight on it.

And this is the relationship between the natural and the artificial. The idea that glass comes from sand has never made sense, and this is where the heavy term of labour and processing that characterises the work of both artists.

Moving to space II, two very important works by Liliana Moro coexist and invite you to sit down, which is impossible in space I, and to listen to the dynamic between work time and break time.

Quattro Stagioni, the sculptural installation by Liliana Moro that is mainly but also seemingly made of ready- mades – like much of her work – speaks of time and the four sunshades that compose it, these emotional and meteorological symbols that protect us from the sun and rain, the weather, but also symbols of leisure and holidays in respective places. The artist has compiled these and created a utilitarian installation that oscillates between work and leisure.

The loudspeaker transmits material from her personal collecting process of a collective collection: all the tracks as she has found, variations of the Pandiera Rossa workers’ anthem, ‘joint’ one behind the other, unchanged, playing incessantly, …senza fine.

The space of life enters the life of art and in her work, artworks meet as scenes and spectators, as heroes and all this in reverse.
She is fed by texts in which speech, the human voice play a central role, and in which bodies play between art, theatre, and life.

Totsikas has been inspired by the Plain of Thessaly and its colours, the practices of the crops and the materials of the farmers.
Unlike Liliana Moro, who creates everything mainly with her mind and what she finds, he does not stop working, mainly with his hands, with the materials from objects and machines and anything else he has gathered.

Sound is the primary material for both, like the voice and the body.

Perhaps his greatest work is the house he built to live in. The one in the field.

And all the works in space III are made from there. The experiential and autobiographical painting and sculptural situation in which Totsikas lives and reigns is presented to us through the rusty windows that he observes, listens to, records with fairytale and natural colours and by the sound of flowing water, the tomato plants grow. Purple for lilacs, red for poppies, black for rain and winter, orange for the crops. Nature is the central material and theme of the works, which are tightly packed together in the space. The meadow, the poppies, the lilacs and the crops, the night, and the rain, the sunset.

Arte Povera; Art made with any material available and the artistic need for economy, the condition of creation, which is its basis if you come from such a place. But what place is not such a place though?

Neither Totsikas nor Moro embrace the term, but their work arises from their recent history. Liliana by proximity: she studied with Luciano Fabro at the Brera Academy. Totsikas knew Kounellis’ work very well and it was a conscious choice to stay in the field. Just as children grow up respecting their parents, evolving language and tradition, but with a great need to break free and rebel, the work of these two artists is characterized by a sense of lightness, by playing in space with materials that exist but are also created from the things they find, a need to kill seriousness and mock the heavy aura of those who came before them.

The THEY exhibition seeks to create a diffracted image of youth – a community without community, thriving in a dissolved, uncertain world where referents move freely, unburdened by hierarchies, and transcending generational and gender constraints.
The exhibition delves into the emergence of languages and forms, exploring how the foundations of a lexicon are established, and how a new way of making art, of being “contemporary” comes about. These contemporary perspectives presume acts of ownership, disappearance, ventriloquism, and the emergence of many social, interpersonal, political, and esthetic practices and experiments – always in action and opposing the inertia of walls.
THEY thus establishes human maps, a sort of moral fable home to all kinds of affects and relationships of identification and indifference – forms of disappearance, a spectral base which leads us, in a certain way, into these worlds where virtuality reigns.
It is a temporary refuge for “wild young people”: dissidents of systems and borders, creators of shapes, bodies, vehicles, and multiplicities, who want life, and not capital, to breed.

THEY, is not about us. It is the statement of a shortfall, a gap.
Given this external perspective, how can we express the condition and creativity of a virtualized collective body? How can we get around the deadlocks of traditional differences, innocence, and primary inventiveness? Can it be achieved by not doing sociology against a backdrop of existential and esthetic crisis? By freeing ourselves from a senile passion for whatever moves, lives, and rebels? How can we conceive of this transitional creature, unable to solidify in its unfinished forms, and instead very much ready to give in, so to speak, to its own unspecialized and powerful youth, turning away from any destiny and specific environment, and holding on to nothing else but its own immaturity and ignorance?

The THEY exhibition is the final chapter of the research project titled “The Raving Age. Histoires et figures de la jeunesse”, directed by Vincent Normand, Philippe Azoury and Shirin Yousefi. This project is an integral part of ECAL’s Master’s degree in Visual Arts.¹
Developed over a two-year period, the program is based on various cross-disciplinary activities including production, analysis and workshops, with many artists, thinkers, writers and students taking part in it.
The platform at www.theravingage.com archives a list of all exchanges and conferences in that context.
The exhibition mirrors a unique collaborative experience between a museum and an art school. Invited artists and students worked closely together during the various stages of the exhibition process, such as design and communication (Lorenzo Benzoni and Luca Frati), scenographic design with David Douard, a reality TV show directed by Sara Sadik, and even a performative piece by Gabriele Garavaglia.

Some of the exhibited pieces were created specifically for this particular occasion, such as those by Julien Ceccaldi, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Mélanie Matranga, Gabriele Garavaglia, Exotourisme (Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Perez) and Jill Mulleady.
Additional existing works were chosen for their specific resonance with the project. These include pieces by David Douard, Morag Keil, Caroline Poggi & Jonathan Vinel and David Wojnarowicz, a truly influential and dreaded figure of youth.

“When the sick rule the world, roses, gardenias, freesias, and other fragrant flowers will no longer be grown. On Valentine’s Day the sick will give one another dahlias and daisies to say I Love You. […] When two sick bodies come together their desperate hearts open, it is lovely to watch them, the thin iridescent haze of sickness flowing across their skin, when two sick bodies fuck their hazy genitals sparkle and frizzle.”

Dodie Bellamy, When the Sick Rule the World (2015)

Konrad Fischer Galerie is delighted to present the first comprehensive solo exhibition by David Douard with the gallery.

The title of the exhibition seems to come from an occult treatise, it invokes scintillating interiorities. There’s something unintelligible in this sequence of irregularly-formatted letters, which string together almost arbitrarily like pearls on a thread. Finding an expressive mode that keeps the inherent obscurity of the meaning of words, therefore allowing a warm and open communication, requires a balance that Douard trains himself to maintain.

The exhibition gathers his equivocal language, which he builds from a network of things with flexible physical and semantic properties. Industrial materials, domestic and public furniture, objects of sensory stimulation for humans and other animals, as well as images and poems collected from blogs all coalesce here. Vertebra by vertebra, these elements are fit together in his sculptures, paintings, and collages.

Le musée invite des figures issues de la nouvelle génération de la création contemporaine (écrivains, musiciens, poètes, performers, vidéastes, peintres, stylistes, réalisateurs), à créer chacune une courte vidéo – oeuvre, performance, poème – dans et avec le musée, en présentant leur propre perspective.

Avec la participation de Ivan Argote, Hicham Berrada, Anton Bialas et Kamilya Kuspan, Mykki Blanco, Bianca Bondi, Guillaume Bresson, Jacob Bromberg, Théo Casciani, David Douard, Eliza Douglas, Jennifer Douzenel, Mimosa Echard, Rafik Greiss, Miles Greenberg, Marie Jacotey, Pan Daijing, Christelle Oyiri, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Edgar Sarin et Marine Serre.

L’exposition Je suis la chaise — reprenant le titre de l’exposition éponyme de Michael Krebber à la Galerie Chantal Crousel en 2007 — explore les différents symboles et interprétations donnés à cet objet aussi bien générique que quotidien. La chaise est ici envisagée par différents artistes comme un volume à déstructurer ou à reconstruire, comme un prolongement du corps humain ou encore comme une allégorie sociale.

La chaise a depuis son origine en Égypte ancienne pour fonction principale de symboliser le rang et le pouvoir de son occupant et propriétaire. Cette origine symbolique est contenue dans l’étymologie même du mot français datant du XIIIe siècle —chaiere— qui signifie chaise, siège, trône. Une chaise est un objet incarné : vide elle marque l’absence, mais utilisée elle ne fait qu’un avec le corps qu’elle vient soutenir. Elle est aussi une invitation à l’immobilité, à la réflexion individuelle ou collective, comme une pause dans le temps. Cette exposition vise à interroger la forme, la fonction, ainsi que la symbolique de la chaise, nous invitant à la reconsidérer grâce aux regards et

La Biennale de Genève Sculpture Garden 2022 présente la nouvelle œuvre de David Douard, Melody (SG) (2022).

S’inspirant du mobilier urbain et des espaces collectifs que sont les abribus où des inconnu·es se rassemblent le temps d’un instant, David Douard crée une structure hybride qui échappe à la fonctionnalité.

Si le dispositif en verre et en métal évoque une certaine rigidité voire l’autorité qui régit l’espace public, les images et textes trouvés sur Internet qui y sont sérigraphiés provoquent un sentiment d’intimité et d’introspection qui perturbe le système. L’environnement apparaît contaminé par le fantasme et les technologies numériques. Le motif du chardon récurrent dans le travail de l’artiste et qui incarne les contraires — à la fois fleur et mauvaise herbe, décoratif et blessant — rappelle avant tout la force de résilience de la nature mais aussi celle des communautés alternatives. La nuit, la pièce s’éclaire comme une veilleuse réconfortante pour les flâneur·euses nocturnes.

David Douard (1983, Perpignan, France) is undoubtedly one of the most intriguing artistic revelations of recent years. Known for his sculptural assemblages and mixedmedia installations, his work explores a broad range of references — poetry, the history of science, technology, animism, low-tech and mainstream culture — nurturing allegorical narratives based on contagious relationships between worlds we’d normally expect to be mutually hermetic. Douard was part of the graffiti scene as a teenager; the streets, and today more specifically the ones surrounding his studio in the Parisian suburbs, have long been a source of inspiration for his work. Graduating from the National School of Fine Arts of Paris in 2011, Douard often cites conceptual art as influential in his work, counterbalanced by a strong desire to remain expressive. Douard transforms the exhibition space in which sculptures, sound works, film and text coalesce. While much of the physical materials making up his sculptures come directly from the street, elements of language are largely collected online; sourced from anonymous platforms, these fragments of poetry and discussion, uttered in the coarse tongue proper to new modes of communication emerging with the Internet, are the backbone of his work. Its digital, physical and conceptual elements are drawn together with Douard’s installations. 0’TĮ »’ lulabięs, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Portugal, brings together and displays David Douard’s complete vocabulary. Alluding to a kind of melody for sleepless children, 0’TĮ »’ lulabięs, both shelters and reveals – it chants, in rhythm, a contagious narrative, the organic and anarchic characteristics of which are meticulously composed by the artist. Its language contaminates and corrupts surfaces akin to a peculiar sort of canvas: metal grids, vertical blinds, bay windows and partitions are all an invitation for expression. With these components, Douard plays with superposition and transparency in an array of gradations and layers, giving a fluid materiality to virtual contents, revealing and exposing a substance otherwise concealed. There is no single way through the exhibition, but rather a multiplication of possible directions, a dense and disconcerting flow reminiscent of the urban environment. An accumulation of glazed and reflective surfaces establishing a relation with other materials — such as metal, magnets, plastic and industrial paints — are affected by motifs, moving images and sounds, each asking for attention. Douard’s manner of understanding and embracing the space is reminiscent of an adolescent’s fabrication of his “own room” — a place of overexposed introspection, inherent to an attempt at self-representation and a search for identity — a space which is both interior and exterior, domestic and urban, intimate and collective. The notion of anarchy spontaneously arises to describe a form of equality, an absence of hierarchy running throughout David Douard’s oeuvre. Recurrent motifs induce a sensation of continuity, of fragmentation and fractality, by the means of which one work extends into another and completes it. In this constructed phantasmagoria submerging the visitor, Douard focuses on the expressive and metaphorical potential of the forms he hybridizes and sets into motion, building a revealing and representative constellation of signs where protest, poetry and discord compose the background of his work.

To enter David Douard’s work, is to pass through a threshold. It is as if you walk inside a mirror and look at the present from an inverted perspective. The structures that make up networked hyper-realities of the everyday turn inoperative and disintegrate. The often-unnoticeable elements that maintain these structures attain presence, autonomy and form new constellations. What is left is a chaotic hybrid environment where materiality and immateriality have collapsed onto one another, and where differing forms of language flow freely. For his second exhibition at Rodeo, O’ thee lil’, David pursues a series of works initiated in his solo show at Paris’ Frac Île-de-France in September 2020. Here again, materials such as aluminium and bronze no longer exist in support of systems of language, but rather become language themselves. Internet sourced texts gain physicality, found and made objects take on a new presence. Their once fixed meanings turn fluid, morphing continually, becoming viral. In Piraeus and London, we perceive the fossilisation of digital flux and feel a continuous tension in objects where hybrid elements hold onto each other, imbricated in a repetition of symbols evoking flow and transmission of language. There is a sense of togetherness, of proximity and distance, of a collective self in which individual bodies can exist anonymously. David Douard is fascinated with anonymous movements, an interest which he has crystallised in the Joker’s mask. To him, they recall a political commitment, the way James Ensor’s paintings would. One could say what he seeks to achieve is to make a digital presence physical, or material, through the objects he creates. A language binds these two shows: one of the appropriation of restraining spaces, of the corruption of sleek surfaces, present both in the digital and physical worlds which David melts together in a unique preoccupation.

Homesick There’s a place somewhere Some place where no one cares You can be there don’t be scared The place is everywhere «Homesick», Jesu Homesickness is an old evil that lingers to this day. It seizes by surprise, in unknown lands and only heals once the exile is over. In the meantime, it extinguishes faces and leaves hearts heavy, and the body, vehicle at a standstill, remains inert while the soul is agitated, trapped in the dead end it has entered, believing itself to be on the way back. There is no difference, between homesickness and nostalgia, a vague and heavy boredom sprang up out of nowhere and spreading everywhere. It too laments a tremendous loss: somewhere, someone, something is missing and nothing tastes or means anything anymore. It’s a pale and grave sentiment that very much resembles the monotonous languor of domestic life, that weary and muffled purr produced by a prolonged stay between four walls. Because safe places hurt too. These customary regions to which we long to return as soon as we have left them are sometimes deceptive. Everything is in its place and chaos, lurking in a corner is no exception. Houses are weird beings. Most of the time, they survive those who inhabit them. Some are unhealthy. Others even kill. The works collected here all maintain close or loose links, with these interior disorders. In a climate of mixed regression and revolt, they occupy a strange and familiar empire of the middle, neither entirely public nor entirely private, a space of threshold, close to the moult, an adolescent position, equally distant from the darkness and the kingdom of childhood, the one we find with severe joy, the one where everything begins and does not end. Domains of struggle, dwellings in peril, they are populated by “transitional objects” *, those with which it is better to equip oneself in case of emotional deficiency to face everyday life, this “dailyness” which “is not evidence, but opacity: a form of blindness, a kind of anesthesia. ”** The house is a body for Olivia Erlanger (1990, New York) who dismembers it before assigning a time slot to each isolated piece. It is exactly 5:13 pm in the bathroom, usually an off-peak time for water rooms. Toilet, bathtub, soap, scales, rubber-duck, bottle of Evian, succulent plant, household products… Clue left to our discretion, seen frontally and plunged between the candy-pink eyelids of an inverted peephole, this miniature panoply provides information on the profile of its temporarily absent residents, as much as it attributes a secret life to their suspect residence, consequently placed under surveillance. Clémentine Adou’s (1988, Paris) twin boxes are also empty. Covered in parts by a deep brown with mirror effect, these cardboard packing boxes, placed on the ground almost as is, still bear traces of their past lifes. They have held quantities of things, passing from hand to hand. Removed from circulation and thereby made visible, these makeshift shelters recycled into rooms for oneself, sort of voting booths for physical exile and cerebral retreat, form an unfinished project. No relaxation or confidences will take place in these impenetrable refuges which, in truth, can leave no respite.

Economy and verticality characterize Julien Monnerie’s radiant pieces (1987, Rennes). Made from collected standard lighting fixtures, assembled and standing, they tell the story of the service sector through forms as generic as their places of use. Six bulbs and twelve fluorescent tubes emit a cold light which curiously radiate, like the flames of an ancient firepit. Left visible, cables and electronic ballasts power these cheap totems, whose thin body covered with yellow and white dots and sticks, stammers illegible characters. The slogan stutters in David Douard (1983, Perpignan). Piece selected among the logorrhea of the Occupy Wall Street movement, an injunction to feel crosses from top to bottom a faux billboard. The letters are upside down, like the doll house, a piece of mud pie cast in aluminum, grafted onto a post behind which an anonymous face laughs slyly. Gentle and hateful at the same time, the ensemble has the gawky charm of the home-made and the deviant spirit of the street. Elsewhere, two amateur videos found on YouTube and Google Maps, generate another: first, a girl lying on a bed dizzying between two confetti showers under the alternating flashes of a mini strobe. Then, in the corner of a bare bedroom, a pair of flowery mattresses stuck to the wall is seen in a loop, from near, from far and almost more. At irregular intervals, the screen turns black, as if closing its eyes to these lonely pleasures, dead pastimes. Paul Bonnet (1990, Paris) knows how to cheat boredom. Started in winter and pursued for six months, his canvas and its incendiary palette depicts the otherworld that appeared at his window, in superimposed layers. On a bridge, in the moonlight, a band of spectres march in a single file between two curtains whose presence is reassuring: this macabre parade would in the end only be a vision of the mind, an obscure dream inspired by a horror novel ***. Still, the presence of this blood orange network surrounded by wormwood green saturating the evening air with decadent curls, makes us feel like staying outside, that is to say on the inside. Sophie Thun’s real fake self-portraits (1985, Frankfurt) were taken at night, in the secrecy of hotel rooms paid for by the artists she assists during the day. She alternates suggestive poses, staring blankly at the device she triggers from a distance. Her double copies her and in the darkroom, their naked bodies put side by side give each other pleasure. Two hands – hers again – hold the false proof of these serial romps: they did not let go of the negatives during their exposure. Power games, image fabrication… The front and backstage of the decor merge, encapsulated in the same frame. Trapped, Christ’s feet point to the sky, like two Greek columns. The left rubs against the right, like a morning when jumping out of bed. These are big manly feet that Lena Henke (1982, Warburg) trussed up into a condom. Dirty, they macerate and suffocate in the double skin that is supposed to protect them. Their ordeal is all the more painful to watch as it occurs on a large scale – six feet, the artist’s height. Insupportable pillars, they form a vulnerable monument, a hideous fetish. David Fesl’s charms (1995, Czech Republic), on the other hand, are cute and fit in the palm of the hand. They are pagan idols, barbaric teddy bears made of poor quality objects from nature or industry, collected from an immediate environment and assembled on instinct. Deer horn, pingpong ball, cake mould, toothpick, orange peel … It’s easy to name each of these things that have left their functions, their original states. Ageless and genderless, pretty and tough, in permanent tension, these votive offerings are undefined. They are likely to die soon, and that as a result we get more attached to them.

Created in June 2020, JOY is founded upon the desire to claim public and urban space as exhibition space through producing works that are visible both day and night. Since September 2020, JOY has invited one artist every month to create a 4x3m poster for a billboard located at 124 rue Henri Barbusse in Aubervilliers.From the Porte de La Villette in Pantin to avenue Henri Barbusse in La Courneuve, passing by rue Henri Barbusse and rue Charles Tillons in Aubervilliers, this second edition, conceived of as a trail leading away from the capital, is an invitation to explore these constantly changing area. The exhibition – visible on foot, by bike, or by car – includes works from Xinyi Cheng, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jennifer Caubet, David Douard, Paul Mignard and Brice Dellsperger. A Hollywood-sized portrait begins the journey. A painting by Xinyi Cheng, this work depicts, Jane, sensual and serene in comparison to the activity of the Porte de la Villette intersection. Thomas Hirschorn then pays homage to the humanist philosopher Simone Weil, whose forceful character inspired a collage that invites us to consider philosophical thought as a means to understand the world. The work of Jennifer Caubet interrogates the social and human function of dwelling. With her work, the artist alerts us to the disappearance of green spaces, essential within residential zones. Documenting the Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus before a part of it was destroyed, she has created a photographic montage out of a series of images, serving as a memento for the garden. David Douard has created a poster that reworks an image gleaned from the internet evoking rumours, whispering, or even gossip. A motif frequently used by the artist, here Douard has chosen to repetitively screen-print the image, the screen both gradually distorting the original, while making it vulnerable to the whims of the autumnal weather. Viewed from the Palmers bridge, a painting by Paul Mignard opens a window onto a psychic landscape drawn from a series of 12 paintings representing the Chukotkan calendar. This painterly work, whose toadstools represent the month of November, attests the artist’s capacity to immerse himself in non-human worlds, emphasising an aspiration for a new naturalist aesthetic. The final poster is an explosion of Brice Dellsperger’s “Body Doubles” in the form of a collage, covering both the front and back of the billboard. Put together as though it were a dance floor, this composition is a compilation of Body “Doubles 32, 35 and 36” starring François Chaignaud [“Body Double 35” inspired by Robert Greenwald’s film “Xanadu” ], Jean Biche [“BD 36 Fucking Perfect”, after James Bridges’ film “Perfect”] and Alex Wetter [“BD 32” which reworks the change room scene from the cult film “Carrie” by Brian de Palma].

The largest part of the exhibition of the 58th October Salon – Belgrade Biennale – which includes over 140 works, 40 of which are new productions, while 20 are public interventions and various site-specific oeuvres – will be presented at the Belgrade City Museum in Resavska Street no. 40b, galleries of the Belgrade Cultural Centre, the Movie Theatre of the Belgrade Cultural Centre, the park of the Museum of Yugoslavia and a number of public spaces all over the city. It is planned for this year’s edition of the Salon to involve television and radio platforms as exhibition venues.

It had been originally planned for the main exhibition to be held in the Belgrade City Museum building in Resavska Street, yet late last year, the venue was changed to the Museum of Yugoslavia, only to be replaced once more with the original location in Resavska Street. The opening was initially planned for 19th September last year, then moved to 16th October, then to 4th June 2021. The change of the main exhibition venue resulted in yet another postponement of the exhibition opening, to 25th June 2021.

The pandemic has made planning harder, especially when it comes to international events, while finding the adequate exhibition space has been a major challenge for the organisers.

With the reconceptualised outlook of The Dreamers and participation of 63 artists and artistic groups, the exhibition still features the complexity of our world and “the ability – now more than ever – to create Worlds and not only to inherit and live within existing ones”. (Ian Cheng) By tracing the fundamental role of dreams in defining the most authentic spirit of the human being in every age and culture, the exhibition defines the world of dream as a timeless and universal space, capable of overcoming cultural, gender, religion, expression and language barriers.

The exhibition catalog, published as Serbian/English bilingual edition by the Cultural Center of Belgrade together with CURA.BOOKS, includes texts by the exhibition curators Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin, as well as authors, researchers and philosopher: Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, Mahfuz Sultan, Melanie Chan, Giulia Bini, Ben Vickers, Anthony Huberman, Tarek Elhaik, Matthew Spellberg, Emanuele Coccia, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ian Cheng, Sanja Bojanić, Saša Ilić and Vladimir Kulić. The catalog is supplemented by a large iconographic atlas of works and an original section dedicated to artist dreams, inspired by the book Sogni/Dreams published by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Francesco Bonami.

Au Plateau, l’exposition présentée est exclusivement conçue pour les moins de dix-huit ans : au-delà du retournement de l’interdit auquel nous sommes habitués, il s’agit d’une façon très radicale d’affirmer la place centrale que les enfants et adolescents occupent dans le projet. En particulier, les artistes de l’exposition sont invités à produire des pièces spécialement conçues pour eux.

Faisant écho à de précédentes initiatives comme au projet itinérant de l’artiste canadien Gareth Moore, Children’s Films, mené en Angleterre et en Allemagne de 2011 à 2014, l’exposition au Plateau fait le même pari d’être non seulement destinée mais aussi uniquement accessible aux enfants.

Les œuvres produites par les artistes sontpensées aussi bien à destination des plus jeunes enfants – avec des œuvres présentées à leur hauteur, des jeux d’échelle et de scénographie – qu’à destination des adolescents, avec un espace « clubbing » proposé par un artiste, tandis qu’une partie de l’exposition offre aux plus grands la possibilité de se mettre en scène avec les œuvres et de partager leur expérience via les réseaux sociaux.

Que ce soit en étant directement les médiateurs de l’exposition auprès d’adultes lors de certains rendez-vous proposés au public, ou en investissant les outils de médiation (journal et film sur l’exposition réalisés par les enfants, dans le cadre d’un travail en amont avec le service des publics du Frac), les enfants sont pleinement acteurs du projet.

* non accompagné.e.s d’un.e – de 18 ans

Règles du jeu

• L’exposition est interdite aux personnes de plus de 18 ans.**
• Un.e adulte de plus de 18 ans peut y entrer uniquement s’il est accompagné.e d’au moins une personne âgée de moins de 18 ans.
• Peuvent exceptionnellement entrer dans l’exposition, sans être obligatoirement accompagné.e.s par des personnes de moins de 18 ans :

1.  les artistes de l’exposition Children Power (y compris ceux participant aux autres volets de l’exposition à Romainville et à Rentilly)
2.  les membres de l’équipe du Frac Île-de-France
3.  les journalistes ayant au préalable pris rendez-vous avec le service communication du Frac Île-de-France
4.  les enseignant.e.s ayant au préalable pris rendez-vous avec le service des publics pour une visite ultérieure avec leur classe composée d’élèves de moins de 18 ans

• Toute prise de vue de l’exposition et des œuvres qui y sont présentées est soumise à l’accord préalable du Frac Île-de-France.

**Sur référendum, les enfants-visiteurs de Children Power ont accordé le droit aux + de 18 ans non accompagné.e.s d’un.e enfant d’entrer au Plateau la dernière semaine de l’exposition, du 12 au 19 décembre 2021.

One of the most visible effects of the Anthropocene, the new geological era characterised by the impact of human activities upon the planet, is the formation of a huge mass of waste that has been called ‘The Seventh Continent’ – 3.4 million square kilometres, 7 million tons of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean. The 16th Istanbul Biennial will explore this new continent: a world where humans and non-humans, our mass-productive systems and natural elements, drift together, reduced to particles of waste.

Today, we are acknowledging that the canonical western division between nature and culture has come to an end. The Anthropocene theory has contributed to this awareness, as the impact of human activities on nature generates an intertwined world where culture is reintegrating into nature, and vice-versa. Meanwhile, due to the increasing interconnections between cultures, as well as the development of transportation and migratory flows, the old centres are turning into megapolises sheltering a multitude of micro-cultures.

The Seventh Continent is an anthropology of an off-centred world and an archaeology of our times. It defines today’s art as an archipelago of diverse enquiries into global life, tracking the prints of human activity on the earth and our impact on its non-human inhabitants.

Back in Paris after a year in Italy, the French artist pursues his interest for language and polymorphie abjects, in a thorough

and sharp research on the irrational. He presents a body of new sculptures in which plaster, alumjnium, wood, metal, leather or textile are combined with everyday abjects. Frozen in their new shape, these abjects !ose their original function entering a metamorphosis. The object–sculpture becomes tense, resists categorisations and opens up to an imaginary dimension, where ghostly presences materialise eluding definitions.

In the labyrinthine walk across the space, plaster masks and faces appear, intertwined ceramic tangues talk to one another, fragments of texts poured into plaster balls are suspended at eye level. The exhibition unfolds then almost as a declaration of love to existence and to the body beyond the tangible.

Hi david, when are you opening?
September 27.

Where?
At KURA. In Milan.

What is the title of the show?
Blindf’old.

What does blindf’old mean?
I don’t have an explanation for the title. Things happen.

Is this a new production?
Yes.

Did you work at the venue?
Yes

What media did you use? Did you create at the foundry?
Objects, both made and found, and other different media. Foundry, yes, i’m working there.

The mask is a recurrent element of your work. What does it represent for you?
The presence of an absence, which is how i see art. The most interesting things are not visible.

In your previous production you focused on interstices (of space and time). Are interstices still part of your interests and your research?
Yes, the double is great. It creates a body with contradiction. I work toward that direction. Always.

Blindness, reflection, mirrors, the iris, the ambiguity of what we see and what we don’t, are all elements which you often refer to…
Yes, it’s about the surface and the presence. Sometimes we just can’t explain, we can’t react to all the information we have. So blindness, as well as reflection, could help understand. The media, the nervous breakdown, the narcissism online…

What will we see (or not see) at the exhibition?
I think life is better than art. But art makes life better. The only thing i can say is that we will see a representation of something interesting and we will know that this is impossible to represent.

« Car il est pour moi de toute première importance qu’en fin de compte, une vie entière, avec toutes ses aspirations, puisse être appréhendée dans son ensemble, sans que rien ne se perde, pas même les moments d’égarement ou d’ennui. »

— Kurt Schwitters, 1927

La Galerie Chantal Crousel a le plaisir de présenter ReCycle, une réflexion sur le pouvoir du recyclage d’objets réunissant dix-sept artistes significatifs, autour d’une sélection d’œuvres créées entre 1942 et 2017.

Cette exposition retrace l’évolution du principe d’assemblage et du potentiel de recyclage à partir des œuvres pionnières de Kurt Schwitters, ainsi que d’artistes qui ont excellé dans cette voie durant les années 1980 et jusqu’à nos jours. Cette démarche n’implique pas uniquement l’idée d’investir d’un nouveau sens les matériaux de la vie quotidienne ; elle questionne également la relation que l’artiste entretient avec eux.

En associant des collages et des œuvres aux techniques mixtes signés Kurt Schwitters, Carol Rama et Ray Johnson, datant du milieu du 20ème siècle, avec des œuvres plus contemporaines, notamment de Thomas Hirschhorn, Clément Rodzielski et David Douard, l’exposition explore différentes organisations hiérarchiques des documents récupérés. Ces œuvres empruntent également des images et des éléments de langage aux magazines et aux médias, suscitant des dialogues inattendus au sein de compositions rigoureusement ordonnées.

Marcel Broodthaers, Tony Cragg et Robert Filliou, quant à eux, mènent avec humour et esprit des expérimentations formelles en jouant avec les caractéristiques physiques des éléments qu’ils emploient. De même, Isa Genzken, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Haegue Yang et Heimo Zobernig, inspirés par la recherche de la fonctionnalité initiale des objets, par les assemblages et installations, détournent la nature première des matériaux employés. À leur manière, ces artistes questionnent la notion d’objet recyclé, sa valeur sociale, économique et politique, afin de renouveler les systèmes de vision et de communication.

Enfin, l’exposition s’intéresse aux aspects des matériaux usagés, en défaut, ou en transformation. Autant de types d’altérations que l’on retrouve dans les œuvres exposées de Wade Guyton, Wolfgang Tillmans et Reena Spaulings. Les rebuts s’y dévoilent avec raffinement, créant des correspondances au-delà des frontières et redéfinissant ainsi le beau.

En définitive, la manière de faire œuvre renvoie aux problématiques actuelles d’une société marquée par les changements environnementaux. De même, la conception visionnaire de l’oeuvre d’art en tant qu’intégrité d’objets et d’expressions de la part d’artistes tels que Kurt Schwitters et les autres artistes réunis dans cette exposition, ajoute un regard positif et constructif sur cette beauté que le langage universel peut nous offrir.

La révolution moléculaire

Pour sa première exposition manifeste, MO.CO. Panacée invite vingt-cinq artistes internationaux dont les œuvres investiront l’intégralité des espaces d’exposition du centre d’art.

L’art des années 2010 semble avoir intégré la notion d’anthropocène, qui désigne une ère dominée par les activités humaines et leur impact sur la planète. Notre représentation du monde évolue ainsi vers une sorte de coprésence avec des sphères autrefois séparées dans la pensée occidentale : le minéral, l’animal, le végétal, la machine et l’humain, qui semblent échanger sans cesse leurs propriétés. Au sein de cette nouvelle promiscuité, la division traditionnelle en Occident entre nature et culture perd peu à peu toute pertinence. Crash Test est né de ce constat.

Cette exposition rassemble une génération d’artistes qui travaillent le réel à son niveau moléculaire, en organisant des connections entre la réalité physique/chimique et les cultures humaines. Ils/Elles décrivent le monde actuel (ses sociétés, ses cultures…) à partir des matières (brutes ou synthétiques) qui le composent, et non plus à partir de données purement sociales, ni même humaines. Et à l’ensemble de ces règnes hétérogènes qui se rapprochent aujourd’hui, on pourrait ajouter l’image, devenue aujourd’hui une pellicule qui entoure notre univers – une atmosphère autonome, une couche de pollution. Les artistes réunis dans Crash test travaillent donc à partir de la réalité matérielle, qu’il s’agisse de ses composantes basiques ou des alliages les plus contemporains : existe-t-il encore un matériau purement « naturel » ou purement « humain » ? Sans revendiquer la posture du scientifique, ces artistes se livrent à des investigations sur les particules qui composent l’univers physique, les composés chimiques, les alliages synthétiques. Certains privilégient la réduction ou la pulvérisation de la matière, avec des œuvres qui analysent le monde physique dans lequel nous vivons, en le décomposant ; d’autres mettent en valeur les réactions et transformations chimiques, à travers des installations en forme de dispositifs expérimentaux, de la pulvérisation (réduction du visible à des éléments basiques) à la solution (dissolution d’éléments dans un solvant) en passant par le précipité (formation d’agrégats moléculaires).

Au sujet de ces démarches radicalement nouvelles, on peut ainsi parler d’un type inédit de matérialisme – ou d’un réalisme analytique, qui prend acte de la fin de la division entre nature et culture sur laquelle se fonde la pensée occidentale, tout autant que de la subordination classique entre la matière et la forme, ici souvent confondues. Un matérialisme dont la question centrale serait : comment un état de la matière représente-t-il un moment de l’histoire ?

It is with great pleasure to present the first exhibition in the gallery by David Douard, BLOOD O’ US. After a series of visits to London, in an effort of familiarizing himself with the gallery space and its surroundings, the rapid changes the area is going through became apparent. The surrounding neverending construction became the center point as (in a space filled with windows looking out) it directs the psychological as well as physical processes that take place indoors. The windows become the luminous backdrop for the show, and David takes the space as material to mold softly and give it a new look. The view, a constant transformative performance that happens for the observer, is of workers destroying and rebuilding, machines that come and go and constant changes that if one forgets about the new urban dominating forms can seem to appear all of a sudden. After spending a week in the space, a series of performances took place, and like a plastic surgeon the artist changed the usual look that is the identity of the gallery, an allegory for a constructed personality, an existing character. As an act of resistance to the ‘authority’ of the gallery, he cut and altered the paths and twisted the usual ways one expects a contemporary art space to be. What firstly looks like an emptied space is in fact a room that carries a series of about seven different variations, proposals for different identities (that have now vanished). The show is composed of two main pieces, BLOOD O’ US, an installation where the model and actress Hari Nef, the only image in the show, appears on a low-fi screen attached on the window, a free standing construction wall and two sound works coming from different sources. South London singer Klein mixed with collected musical material from a recent exhibition and David’s daughter’s voice, resonate and echo in the space. The transgendered body becomes here a focal reference as the penultimate transformative position (man to woman, or vice versa), a pop idol in full blossom, the posture a reference to historical portraits from the history of art. Acte de Salon is a work that was created in the space and defines a new direction in David’s practice. Reflecting the architectural interventions, the composition is of found and made elements and by association transforms the gallery into a mask in itself, a proposition to see things differently even where things are invisible but end up revealing themselves; an act of a possible silent revolution.

Le Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris présente MEDUSA, une exposition portant un regard contemporain et inédit sur le bijou, qui révèle certains tabous.

Tout comme le visage de Méduse dans la mythologie grecque, le bijou attire et trouble celui qui le conçoit, le regarde ou le porte. Objet au statut ambigu, à mi-chemin entre parure et sculpture, il reste l’une des formes d’expression artistique les plus anciennes et universelles bien qu’il ne soit pas nécessairement considéré comme une oeuvre d’art. Il est en effet souvent perçu comme trop près du corps, trop féminin, précieux, ornemental, ou primitif.
Mais il doit aux artistes d’avant-garde et aux créateurs contemporains d’avoir été réinventé, transformé et éloigné de ses propres traditions.

Dans la continuité des expositions collectives et transversales du musée, comme « L’Hiver de l’Amour », « Playback », « Decorum », MEDUSA entend interroger les frontières traditionnelles de l’art, en reconsidérant, avec la complicité des artistes, les questions de l’artisanat, du décoratif, de la mode, de la culture pop.

L’exposition réunit plus de 400 bijoux : réalisés par des artistes (Anni Albers, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Lucio Fontana, Niki de Saint Phalle, Fabrice Gygi, Thomas Hirschhorn, Danny McDonald, Sylvie Auvray…), des bijoutiers d’avant-garde et de designers (René Lalique, Suzanne Belperron, Line Vautrin, Art Smith, Tony Duquette, Bless, Nervous System…), mais aussi des bijoutiers contemporains (Gijs Bakker, Otto Künzli, Karl Fristch, Dorothea Prühl, Seulgi Kwon, Sophie Hanagarth…) ou encore des joailliers (Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Victoire de Castellane, Buccellati…), ainsi que des pièces anonymes, plus anciennes ou non-occidentales (de la Préhistoire, du Moyen-Age, des bijoux amérindiens, du punk et du rap au bijou fantaisie…).

Ces pièces, connues et méconnues, uniques, multiples, faites à la main, industriellement, ou par ordinateur, mélangent des esthétiques raffinées, artisanales, amateures, ou au contraire futuristes. Elles vont parfois bien au-delà du bijou et n’hésitent pas à explorer des usages inhabituels.

L’exposition s’articule autour de quatre thématiques : l’identité, la valeur, le corps, et le rite. Chaque section part des a priori souvent négatifs qui entourent les bijoux, pour mieux les déconstruire, et révéler, in fine, la force subversive et performative qui les sous-tend.
Une quinzaine d’installations d’artistes contemporains (Mike Kelley, Leonor Antunes, Jean-Marie Appriou, Atelier E.B., Liz Craft…) rythme le parcours en écho avec les sections de l’exposition. Les oeuvres présentées questionnent les problématiques du décor, et de l’ornement et ancrent notre relation au bijou dans un rapport élargi au corps et au monde.

‘I’ DID X’IST BE-

FORE

The bird beak contained within the glass ball raises the idea of an absent body, symbolized by the blown air. This dismembered beak also seems to be taking the shape of a face which everyone can appropriate, as an avatar. The copper covering up the beak acts as an element of transmission where identities can be swapped and interweaved with one another. Inserted at the point where air is blown into the glass by David Douard, the beak works as an extension of his own mouth, as well as of an anonymous one. Within this new blown environment, the avatar can finally exist and earn its own independence. This is nonetheless an aching breath, a silent cry almost like a sight, a frustrated speech which has the power to renew and reinvent itself inside the glass ball.

David Douard’s inspiration is fuelled by anonymous conversations, poems, and photos from the darknet, an encoded version of the internet. All this finds its abstracted translation in hybrid objects, which oscillate between organic and technical representations. In his first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Douard scatters traces in order to make them disappear again later. Even though some of the works seem to be inaccessible, their atmosphere – both sober and melancholic at the same time – can still be felt and experienced in a very intense way.

KUNSTSAELE presents To Lie in the Cheese, to Smile in the Butter, an exhibition exploring psychic and spatial interiors as sites of production. Instead of representing an interior world, the exhibition challenges the notion of private interior as being related to a more “romantic tradition” compared to public exteriority’s stronger historical association to the avant-garde.¹ Opposing this binary, this exhibition looks at the private domain as a space for experimentation and anarchy – a room to play as well as to act.

KUNSTSAELE’s 18th century bourgeois setting might once have set a polished stage for entertaining, but here grandeur grooves with the theatrical, hobbyism fraternizes with professionalism. The materiality of interior space is unpacked through common materials to explore intuitive acts and mental fragmentation, wanderings made solid by invention of novel, performative shapes. Individual works repeat together to form new fictional identities. The psychic interior, meanwhile, is a space of ultimate aloneness. Potential has a way of emerging from such solitude, rising to the surface with effervescence. Here, the artists allow for wandering extensions of social and political realities, in which characters and contexts become unbound, spilling in from exterior realms into private ones to become exaggerated, grotesque, arch-versions of their original selves.

It is the journalist Tom Kummer, fabricating his imaginary dialogues with Pamela Anderson from his small bungalow somewhere in Los Angeles. In a world where work and person are increasingly expected to be unified, isolated and intimate spheres can be structures of resisting this very condition. An interior breeds fluid identity. Roles are exchangeable.

More than mere appendage, a publication accompanies the exhibition as its literary extension. Frances Stark’s seminal The Architect & the Housewife acts as its anchor, unpacking the conditions of her home-based artistic practice, and in turn underlining the interiorized experience of writing itself. These texts will echo throughout the exhibition space, though read by different authors, presented within a rotating program throughout the duration of the exhibition.

To Lie in the Cheese, to Smile in the Butter sees rooms as possibilities, mindscapes as limitless environments, and private worlds as an idealistic avant-garde free from constraint. Visual, written and sensory narratives improvise to activate imagery that is not bound to representation, but lingers between appearance and reality.

¹ Stark, Frances: The Architect & the Housewife, London 1999, p. 11.

First, there is the young girl. Her senses are fattened yet condemned to the silence of a language proper to sculpture. There is a significant paradox between the sculptural figure, welcoming and warm, in which we could curl up, and, the transformative young lady or chimera in mutation in her own domestic space, noncompliant, becoming pure fantasy. Where are our figures of comfort? How do we get used to them? How do we transform them? It’s true that some people are shut in an impregnable silence — the same as sculpture — in this constraining society. The tongue is a potential motif of the transmission of a sick language that does not exist in a tangible reality but on networks. The poems, gleaned from the Internet, are coming to life but disrupted, selectively. Only snippets on the surface reach us, like her voice that erupts, without knowing where from. The impossibility to constitute concrete links is emphasised, technology is in permanent flux, perpetually moving. We’re abandoned to our own malaise so that we can embrace a lassitude and an anxiety toward modalities of construction of uninterrupted networks – a fear of complete emptiness. These systems are both those of state supervision and objects that are now familiar, even perfunctory. The glass ball is at the same time a surveillance camera and the chandelier of the young lady’s room: the duality of objects. She positions herself with the necessary distance to comprehend on what she’s placing affect and that is, at the same time, stabbing her in the back. The mirror puts forward the complex proposition that the young lady had to nurture her self image and to dissolve her representation in technological formats. That’s not a pessimistic point of view, but rather a way to question those representations and problematize a new social and political being. Like those objects that have been transformed through digestion, the young lady can only contemplate some form of novelty and a force of political autonomy by enduring absorption. The young lady not only has a mouth but a body. And her words, deeply buried in another reality, are inscribed and resonate on every wall. She that didn’t have a voice, is filling herself with the gold of crowns, and, putting it in her mouth, bending all sovereign symbols, erecting in the dark the words that – tomorrow we will need to listen.

The cypress is the tree’s grief and not                                 the tree, and it has no shadow because it is                                 the tree’s shadow

Bassam Hajjar

The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept onthe road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green,as it has always been. No one got hurt. The vehiclessped over its branches. The dust blewinto the windshields … / The cypress broke, butthe pigeon in a neighboring house didn’t changeits public nest. And two migrant birds hovered abovethe hem of the place, and exchanged some symbols.And a woman said to her neighbor: Say, did you see a storm?She said: No, and no bulldozer either … / And the cypressbroke. And those passing by the wreckage said:Maybe it got bored with being neglected, or it grew oldwith the days, it is long like a giraffe, and littlein meaning like a dust broom, and couldn’t shade two lovers.And a boy said: I used to draw it perfectly,its figure was easy to draw. And a girl said: The sky todayis incomplete because the cypress broke.And a young man said: But the sky today is completebecause the cypress broke. And I saidto myself: Neither mystery nor clarity,the cypress broke, and that is allthere is to it: the cypress broke!

– Mahmoud Darwish

The exhibition Exquisite Corpse is named after and based on the principle of the game invented by André Breton and the Surrealists in 1925 in Paris to liberate unconscious thought by means of random word and image associations. At first they played with poetic language, then it developed into collaborative drawings. Surrealist dynamics undermined the logic imposed by language or the figurative and symbolic codes governing the representation of the body in between the two wars. In the current moment of acute disarray, the deregulated and chaotic imagery in the media offers both the pleasure of anonymous flesh and increasingly morbid depictions of casualties with unclear origins—at once monstrous and fascinating, and increasingly surreal. Chaotic order and confusion convey a beauty that sometimes best reflects the orld but also allows us to better grasp it. Gathered here at The Mistake Room, works based on fragments, on the principle of collage, or on collaboration conjure the original surrealist spirit. But the exhibition itself should also be envisioned as an exquisite corpse. In this playful process, the same bodies are subject to new associations, giving rise to other, possibly more irrational, narratives. The first approach to an object is metonymic: through fragments, or a cut out of a bigger image. Limbs or body parts might suggest fetishes—a section of Danh Vo’s scattered, statue of liberty, a split jewelry display bust by Clement Rodzielski, a bronze head or a torso in the hands of Gabriel Orozco, a concrete cast of an horror mask by Jean-Luc Moulène, or a detail of an uploaded photo of GI’s celebrating Halloween in Afghanistan by Allora & Calzadilla. Other elusive or abstract bodies also appear in Warhol’s ambiguous urine splash signature, Fabrice Gygi’s leather envelop, Heimo Zobernig’s bean bag, or David Douard’s deflated airbag. In addition, contradictory images, removed from their contexts, are combined to scramble our readings. While Wolfgang Tillmans takes aim at image production (while wandering in digital printing and food processing fairs), Thomas Hirschhorn eliminates the hierarchy between fashion and war photography. Haegue Yang celebrates hybridity with a figurative hay vase associating traditional craft and modernity. Furthermore, Roberto Cuoghi’s eroded gondola pole becomes a demoniac monument for the Mesapotamian god Pazuzu. Abraham Cruzvillega’s recent self-portrait ironically delineates the complexity of his own persona and equilibrium. Oscar Tuazon and writer Ariana Reines collaborated on a Greek-inspired, erected herm, conjugating their differences and complementarity. Hybridity and ambiguity are indeed the core of any collaborative work which invites distance, a strategy abolishing monolithic authorship that the Surrealists also embraced. Reena Spaulings collectively painted parts of the auto racing and advertising spokeswoman Danica Patrick, while Lisa Jo and Amy Yao seduce us with the trailer of a feature film that might never be released.

Dans un monde bouleversé par la troisième révolution industrielle, l’utilisation d’Internet et des supports de téléphonie mobiles a engendré un nouveau mode de communication lié à un flux constant d’informations. L’individu est à la fois indépendant et relié à des réseaux multiples : professionnels, techniques, artistiques, culturels, au-delà de toute limite géographique. Cette organisation est symptomatique de ce que le sociologue Barry Wellman appelle « l’individualisme connecté ».
Ce qu’on nomme aujourd’hui The Internet of Things (l’Internet des choses), renvoie à l’idée que l’être humain n’est plus le seul sujet pensant mais que les objets qui l’entourent, composent un environnement intelligent qualifié d’Ambient Intelligence (Intelligence Ambiante).
Au travers d’installations, de vidéos, de sculptures, de peintures, les artistes explorent cette complexité d’échanges qui dépasse l’échelle humaine. Ils s’intéressent à la manière dont l’intelligence et la conscience peuvent s’étendre aux machines, aux animaux, aux organismes vivants.
Dans une société caractérisée par l’accélération des données et l’omniprésence de l’image, les artistes s’inscrivent dans une culture de la visibilité, où les limites entre sphères privées et publiques s’estompent, où l’intimité devient « extimité ».
Pour concevoir la mise en scène de l’exposition, le collectif DIS, connu notamment pour leur plateforme liftestyle DIS Magazine, s’inspire des espaces de travail collectif, des centres commerciaux, des zones de transit d’aéroport. L’exposition prend ainsi la forme d’un réseau associant oeuvres, installations interactives et performances. Elle inscrit le musée dans un monde de flux et de circulation.

Les thèmes abordés dans l’exposition feront l’objet de conférences et de rencontres au sein de The Island (KEN) créé en collaboration avec Dornbracht, co-designé par Mike Meiré, installation entre cuisine et salle de bain, spécialement conçu par DIS et coproduit avec le New Museum de New York.

En visitant l’atelier de David Douard, je me suis souvenu d’un recueil de textes consacré au lettriste François Dufrêne. Notamment, un passage de l’introduction, mentionnant les thèses de Cesare Lombroso sur la concordance entre poésie moderne, aliénation mentale et troubles à l’ordre public, m’est revenu à l’esprit pendant notre discussion. Tristement célèbre pour sa théorie de la dégénérescence et de l’hérédité criminelle décelable anatomiquement, Lombroso se méfiait des avant-gardes. Inquiet du caractère contagieux que la poésie moderne pouvait faire courir à la société de la fin du XIXème siècle, le psychiatre turinois a analysé les phénomènes de dissociation de mots en comparant le cerveau d’aliénés et de certains poètes à « une usine privée de ses contremaîtres, dont les ouvriers continueraient certes à travailler, mais dans un désordre si complet, une absence de coordination telle que l’établissement ne produirait plus rien qui vaille. » Lombroso fait preuve, ici, d’une intuition déroutante, presque foucaldienne – les adversaires d’une forme, d’un geste ou d’une pensée étant parfois les exégètes les plus lucides.

Détraquée, l’usine de David Douard se nourrit, elle aussi, d’un flux poétique qui contamine les formes qu’elle recycle, puis qu’elle recrache dans l’espace d’exposition. S’étant intéressé de près au Lettrisme, David Douard connaît le potentiel disruptif d’une déstructuration sémantique. Son travail de sculpteur est traversé en continu par le langage, considérant le principe poétique comme un code corrompu, un virus informatique dont le potentiel d’altération viendrait reconfigurer la matière à la manière du glitch, télescopage accidentel de sons ou d’images  qui s’opère à la faveur d’un dysfonctionnement informatique.

La pratique sculpturale – reformulée selon des problèmes d’ingénierie de la communication – devient dès lors un territoire d’hybridation, un univers au sein duquel biologie et sciences de la communication sont soumises aux mêmes virus, où toute hétérogénéité peut être confrontée au démantèlement, au réassemblage, à l’investissement et à l’échange. Avec ce programme, David Douard dévoile et détourne les processus de transfusion qui relient les catégories biologiques, technologiques, politiques, mythologiques et identitaires au sein du capitalisme avancé – comme s’il existait un cousinage implicite entre les formes produites dans son atelier et la figure théorique hybride du cyborg, telle que Donna Haraway a pu la décrire dans les années 1980 pour étayer son cyberféminisme. Dans l’exposition Bat-Breath. Battery, les éprouvettes de laboratoire deviennent des pipes à eau pour inhaler des drogues, des bouches grimaçantes crachent de la connectique, les effets de textures s’entremêlent, des chevelures ondoient sous les surfaces de synthèse. Entre l’organique et la machine, le vivant et l’artefact, le corps et l’esprit, la nature et la culture, le sujet et l’objet, ou encore le masculin et le féminin, l’exposition toute entière est parcourue par des glissements de sens, des translations qui outrepassent ces dualités périmées du modernisme.

Le cœur de l’exposition est lui-même désaxé puisque l’espace de la galerie n’est que le récepteur d’une station de radio que David Douard diffuse depuis internet. Sa mission est d’émettre en continu des poèmes lus et malmenés par la chanteuse Pricilla Ay Avah dont la bouche est entravée par un curieux bijoux, mi-mors, mi-dentier. L’exposition s’envisage comme un salon d’écoute au sein duquel le flux poétique retransmis devient alors souffle, fumée, salive, ondes, fréquences, au service d’une pratique de la propagation et du décentrement. À l’image des photographies de spirites exhalant des substances blanchâtres en vogue au XIXème siècle, David Douard produit un art ectoplasmique, selon l’étymologie (ektos : « au dehors » / plasma : « forme »), puisqu’il nous donne la possibilité de percevoir les fluides qui nous traversent et nous transforment.

“…his sense of justice turned him into a brigand and a murderer.” – Michael Kohlhaas, Heinrich von Kleist, trans. Martin Greenberg

On a balmy morning on the 22nd of March, 1540, the horse dealer Hans Kohlhase was broken at the wheel in the center of the public square in Cölln (what is now modern day Berlin). Ten years earlier, Kohlhase, while traveling from Brandenburg to a fair in Leipzig, had his horses stolen by a Saxon nobleman. Kohlhase, a generally well-liked and reputable merchant, first attempted to reason with the noble, but found him unwilling to return his property. He mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit, and finally appealed to the local government, again in vain. In desperation, Kohlhase gathered together a small army of sympathetic citizens and inaugurated a vicious rebellion against the Saxon nobility. For six years, as peasants rioted in solidarity, he rampaged the countryside. Wittenburg burned to the ground. Neither the elector of Brandenburg nor even Martin Luther himself could do much to resolve the situation. Ultimately, surrendering himself to the authorities, Kohlhase was compensated for the illegal seizure of his property, and then summarily executed.

This exhibition gathers together the work of twelve artists. It contemplates the aesthetics of late medieval violence and its modern equivalents.

From the perspective of the present, the future of humanity might be monstrous… but this is not necessarily a bad thing.”
– Julieta Aranda

The image of the human being has changed significantly in recent decades. Technological innovations, socioeconomic transformations, and new insights gained in neurology compel us to rethink the constructs that define what is human and enable us to conceive them anew in the form of the inhuman.

The artists participating in the exhibition “Inhuman” offer visions of the human being as a socially trained yet resistant body, transcending biologically or socially determined gender classifications, as a digitally immortal entity, or as a constantly evolving self. They visualize the constructs that define what is human and shift existing perspectives on human subjectivity and the body, thereby questioning the primacy of the human being at a fundamental level.

For his first solo exhibition in Italy, the French artist David Douard will present a site-specific work centered around a suspended sculpture. An anthropomorphic figure, of which we only get to glance two legs midair, caught in the moment of descending from above or jumping – but actually hanging – which the artist connects to the phenomenon of suicide, especially in adolescence.

The ambiguous image creates a state of uncertainty regarding the scene we are looking at, a hybrid device called to respond to the issue of language, the interruption of thought, but also to the possibility that word and knowledge are continually revitalized through an uninterrupted flow between the sphere of life and that of death.

Douard often works on gaps: visible and invisible, presence and absence, here and elsewhere. Whether referring to a microscopic universe, which he hints at like in many previous works related to food or water intake, and the pitfalls that they hide, or, as in this case, to a space-time limbo in which different hemispheres incidentally touch, intersect, reveal themselves.

SO, the two letters which like the keys on a typewriter are printed on the soles of the hanging figure, convey such a sense of continuity. SO is the conjunction used in the common language at the beginning of a sentence, as an expression that suggests the subsequent processing of thought. But also emphasizes a break, a transition, a point between a before and an after. The artist relates in this way the physical presence of the sculptures in words, concepts, verses, and poems that anonymous authors have put on the web, summarizing in an imaginary animist character the origin of thought and of all things, in the suspended sphere that inanimate objects trigger with respect to their ability to act when giving back an image.

Through the use of multiple media including video, sculpture, sound, text, and collage, Douard confirms his penchant for creating gender hybrids, and shortens the distance between organicity and technology, between archetypal sedimentations – windingly remodeled, reformulated, and projected in an imaginary future – and the intimate sense of the present, perpetually poised.

The exhibition includes a series of limited editions. Each piece is composed of a cardboard box containing a small dish with eggshells and other materials put under transparent resin. The boxes also include a selection of black and white prints presenting texts and images drawn by the artist from the web and from his own archive.

Que la connaissance c’était aussi le vent, 
aussi bien celui qui s’engouffrait dans l’autoroute 
que celui qui traversait l’esprit.

Marguerite Duras, La Pluie d’été, P.O.L, 1990

Ernesto est un personnage de fiction imaginé par Marguerite Duras et par ses lecteurs.

Un enfant sans âge qui décide de ne pas retourner à l’école parce qu’à l’école, on lui apprend « des choses qu’il ne sait pas ».

Marguerite Duras dit « Ernesto dit en quelque sorte, on m’apprend le savoir mais pas la connaissance. Ou bien, on m’apprend des choses qu’il ne m’intéresse pas de savoir. Autrement dit : on ne me laisse pas apprendre à ne pas apprendre, à me servir de moi-même. »

Ernesto a fait l’objet chez Duras de réécritures constantes pour différents supports, questionnant sans cesse les limites et les définitions des genres qu’elle exploite.

D’abord héros d’Ah ! Ernesto, conte pour enfants accompagné d’illustrations de Bernard Bonhomme publié en 1971, Ernesto est multiple, volatil et paradoxal.

Interprété par Axel Bogousslavsky dans le film Les Enfants qu’elle tourne en 1984, Ernesto a sept ans mais en paraît quarante.

Ernesto est l’aîné des « brothers » et « sisters » d’une famille d’immigrés dans La Pluie d’été, roman qu’elle publie en 1990, dans lequel elle développe la trame narrative à Vitry-sur-Seine, le « lieu le moins littéraire que l’on puisse imaginer ».

Mis en scène à de nombreuses reprises au théâtre comme au cinéma, Ernesto s’adapte, s’illustre, s’incarne, se métamorphose, mais ne se résume pas. Ernesto est un matériau, une source d’inventions, un usage, un nuage.

Ernesto est un insecte qui rachâche dans le court-métrage de Jean-Marie Straub et Danièle Huillet réalisé en 1982.

Ernesto est un jardin qui est un arbre qui est à l’angle de la rue Berlioz qui est à Vitry. Ernesto est une image de cet arbre de synthèse dont le vent n’agitera plus les branches.

Ernesto est un écran sur lequel ne se projette que le souvenir d’une pluie de printemps ou le bonheur des tristes.

Ernesto est une traduction, un passage d’un médium à un autre, d’une discipline à une autre, un prisme, un trou dans une encyclopédie de philosophie.

Ernesto est un corps absent dont ne subsiste qu’une paire de chaussures sur lesquelles poussent des fleurs artificielles.

Ernesto n’est pas un sujet, encore moins une démonstration. Ernesto est une voix. Un silence. Une parole dont on ne distingue plus le sens.

Ernesto est 150 variations d’un flocon de neige en papier, une graine qui prend la mer en bouteille, un tabouret qui veut oublier sa fonction.

Ernesto est simultanément une grande carcasse d’autoroute déserte, la poursuite du vent et la Vanité des Vanités, le manque à penser Dieu dans un monde loupé, un amour absolu, un rejet des normes et des institutions, une connaissance intuitive.

Ernesto, « c’était pas la peine ».

Astrup Fearnley Museet is pleased to present the exhibition Europe, Europe. Encompassing more than 40 artists and eight alternative spaces from eight European cities, it is the first part of an extensive and evolving exhibition series.
Over of the last 10 years, the Astrup Fearnley Museet has initiated a number of exhibitions that map different art scenes in different countries, including Uncertain States of America, China Power Station, Indian Highway and Imagine Brazil. Now, the Museum turns its focus to young European artists with Europe, Europe.
The European art scene is perhaps even more rich and multiple than those previously featured, since Europe is a continent composed of many different nations, languages and cultures. Because of the complexity of these different artistic scenes, and due to the scale of the project, the curatorial team has decided to work with an ‘organic curatorial model’, creating an exhibition that can change and develop over time. The exhibition is scheduled to travel to several key contemporary art venues in Europe over the coming years. The curators, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Boutoux and Gunnar B. Kvaran, have been working on the show over the last three years. In addition to selecting artists, they have chosen one correspondent (a local expert) and one alternative exhibition space from each of the eight cities featured – Oslo, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, Zurich, Prague and Lisbon/Porto. The correspondents have subsequently invited two additional artists to be included in the exhibition. Altogether, the show encompasses more than 40 artists, all under the age of 35, and eight alternative spaces. Throughout the autumn, the alternative spaces will create a number of exhibitions and projects within the exhibition, with separate openings, especially conceived for Europe, Europe. In collaboration with other museums or exhibition spaces, Europe, Europe will cumulatively cover the entire continent by the end of the project, which will span several years. Each time the exhibition moves to a new institution, the constellation of European cities will grow, as each institution replaces four of the eight cities with four new ones.
The exhibition’s theme The general theme of the exhibition is the artist’s mobility and migration in Europe, the fluidity of artistic ideas and the encounter between different artistic and cultural scenes. This development in recent years stems from the fact that the interrelationship between European countries has changed radically with the development of the EU (European Union) and the disappearance of frontiers between countries. Even though the EU has mainly developed to facilitate financial and commercial transactions in Europe, without showing any visible interest in including artistic and cultural questions in this important project, artists have taken advantage of the reduced frontiers and established themselves wherever they see new possibilities.
Adding to this is the Bologna Agreement, initiated by the EU during the 1990s, which directed traditional European art schools away from a basis in technical skills, towards a more academic research-based education. This reformation has radically changed knowledge production within art schools, resulting in the emergence of more intellectuals, who then become artists and even critics, curators, gallery workers or other kinds of professionals within the art world.

Europe is a territory that is more polycentric than ever before, where artists come and go from one city to another, without being attached to their home countries or restricted by the canons and rules that once defined and structured the various European nations. The exhibition will highlight this mobility and migration, and address the fluidity and encounter between different artistic and cultural scenes in Europe. In conjunction with the exhibition in Oslo the Museum will publish several publications. For the opening a mini catalogue is launched with an introduction by the curatorial team. It will serve as a manual of how to comprehend the exhibition and its concept. Each of the eight correspondents contributes with a discerning introduction to the art scene in which he or she currently works in. In conjunction with the exhibition the Astrup Fearnley Museet will later publish an extensive catalogue presenting, debating and documenting EUROPE, EUROPE.Hans Ulrich Obrist, Thomas Boutoux and Gunnar B. Kvaran

Human activity has been transforming the planet for millennia. All the ecosystems now bear the mark of human presence, but the scale and speed of change in the last 60 years, called by scientists The Great Acceleration, also led them to name anthropocene this new geological epoch — an era marked by the strong impact of human activities upon the atmospherical and geological evolution of planet earth.

Taipei Biennial 2014 uses this image in order to examine how contemporary art adresses this new contract between human beings, animals, vegetals, machines, products and objects. How does today’s art define and represent our space-time ? The exhibition will highlight the way artists focus on links, chainings, connections and mutations : how they envision planet earth as a huge network, where new states of matter and new forms of relations appear…

To describe capitalism in the 19th century, Karl Marx talked about a “ghost dance” pulling along the humans, their products and their environment. Reification on one side (the transformation of the living into an object) and prosopopeia on the other (a figure of speech that represents an object or a dead person speaking) are the two major patterns of the new « ghost dance » of global economy. But in addition to these two figures, we could add montage, as a connection principle between heterogeneous realities.

The sphere of inter-human relations cannot be conceived anymore without its environmental and technological sides. Since the beginning of the XXIst century, contemporary artists tend to renegociate their relationships with both technosphere and biosphere, exploring the knots that link the living and the object, the machine and the body, the technological and the social – and experiencing their interdependence.

The uprising of a new « global spirituality » in art appears in the focus made on outsiders and occult forms in the last Venice Biennial, or in the recent calls for an « animist » state of mind in the arts. In the theoretical field, Bruno Latour calls for a « parliament of things », while a recent philosophical movement, « Speculative realism », criticizes anthropocentrism and the notion of « human finitude » so present in western thought : for those philosophers, thinking and being are not correlated, and the human individual does not have any preeminent position in the access to being. Quentin Meillassoux even rejects the necessity of all physical laws of nature, and Graham Harman considers everything as an object, whether physical, fictional, living or inert. Others, like François Jullien, reexamines western philosophy in a critical way, by confronting its basic concepts to chinese thought, in which he identifies new potentialities.

This movement of cross-pollenization, both cultural and techno-scientific, might lead us to a possible global refoundation of aesthetics, and it will be at the heart of Taipei Biennial 2014. The exhibition will adress the cross-overs appearing in the art of the anthropocene ; it will focus on artists for whom objects, products, computers, screens, chemistry, natural elements or living organisms are interconnected with humans, and can be used by them for a critical analysis of contemporary world.

SCULPTURE ODENSE 14 has the tagline Still Waters Run Deep. Danish and international artists have been invited to exhibit both in inner-city Odense and its green spaces, thereby creating a route through different times, moods and locations.

Through time the city of Odense has been shaped by cultural changes and every view, every square and every street contain several historical, spatial and human dimensions. Still Waters Run Deep takes the shapes of the city, where immaterial values and moods mix with specific experiences, as its starting point. Traces, feelings, forgotten times, dramas and perceptions suddenly stand out when the sculptures make their entry in Odense.

The exhibition will explore the interaction between the facades and the depths of the city. It will use Odense as a sculptural space where passages are like portals between past and future: the sculptures vary from modernist explorations of reflections, spaces and material to contemporary social and psychological experiments which excavate our perception of reality. Most of the new commissioned works explore objects and places as cultural deposits representing both individual and collective worlds.

David Douard (b. 1983, lives and works in Paris) draws inspiration from the processes of transformation and development at work in our world, making plants, wit, saliva, images, technology or language into tools to reveal the principles of transmission. Organic, porous and complex, his work deploys itself in bounds and imitates the dynamics of a proliferating virus, insinuating itself into the “ills of reality” and the contamination of the world, and infiltrating the mysteries and anomalies of our programming. David Douard unfurls his exhibition “Mo’Swallow” like a fable that he might unravel between the feeding breast and the dumbfounded eye as a witness to the absurd mutations of the world. He uses for example the leitmotiv of rumor, that mysterious mental contagion resembling an irrational spasm without substance, reason, intention or even origin. This rumor is born, develops, is transmitted, disappears, transforms itself and bursts forth anew, enhanced by the prowess of language and the fertile ground of contemporary mythologies. As a sign of the living and the movement of imaginaries, it is close to a primitive and instinctive mode of thinking from which the exhibition draws substance. As a collective work, it functions as a connector between consciousnesses, a progressive psychic contamination. Bewitchment of the world and collective ventriloquism: this mental contagion is as much a magical response as a necessary remedy to master the unknown. ““Mo’Swallow” draws its forms from this jubilation of the absurd akin to a waking dream, recreating through mutations a scenario in which the human, the poetic, language and the machine are able to lay bare the troubling activities of the world.

GEOGRAPHIES OF CONTAMINATION
Geographies of Contamination forms a landscape, a common ground for three curators to survey from different, but convergent, vantage points the return to materiality in contemporary practice and discourse. This short text will address materiality as a process that contaminates, hybridises, stretches and suspends the aesthetic systems operating in single artworks.
Two recently formulated critical terms can help us to understand this process. Post-Internet was coined in 2008 by the artist Marisa Olson in interviews and texts1; elaborated by the writer Gene McHugh in an eponymous blog2; and described by the American artist Artie Vierkant3 to be ‘a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials’. New Aesthetics emerged out of Post-Internet debates as an online research project by the artist and writer James Bridle into the ‘physicalisation of what was/is more commonly purely digital – a realisation of immateriality as physicality’.4
Both concepts prompted a spate of exhibitions in commercial and public galleries. The latest and most exhaustive of these, Speculations on Anonymous Materials, was curated by Susanne Pfeffer at the Fridericianum in Kassel this past autumn. According to Pfeffer, ‘art’s brief is no longer to generate unique, original images, but to seek reflection in a de-subjectivised approach to the existing stocks of objects, images and spaces. The order of the day is to understand the world from the vantage point of abstraction and not to abstract from the world’.5 The exhibition addressed ‘surface, real and virtual spaces, digital imaging and analog staging’ and practices that reinterpret ‘the Anonymous Materials created by rapid and incisive technological change’. At the same time the exhibition acknowledged a return to materiality, in which digital images and technologies are articulated in objects and installations that mix traditional techniques with recent digital technologies.

Not that materiality had been absent in recent artistic development. But it was being addressed more as a perception linked to impersonal or immaterial sources than as a physicality. The material richness of some of Parker Ito’s work, for instance, is primarily conceived as a contradiction between its photo-documentation and its diffusion into digital networks and social media platforms, where it is experienced by the viewer as an entirely different work. One of the fundamental contributions of the Post-Internet and New Aesthetics debates has been to shed light on the paradoxes of ‘immaterial physicality’ and of impersonal subjectivity in contemporary culture, and by extension on the physical experience of artworks. A number of artists have responded by using the digital not simply as a tool but as a structure from which to investigate these paradoxes and their effects on the object and the subject through a return to materiality. Or as seen in Geographies of Contamination, the creative contamination of diverse systems.
This return to materiality, centred on the object – subject relation, has been discussed in contemporary philosophy. As Svenja Bromberg claims in The Anti-Political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond: ‘philosopher Jane Bennett pushes this aesthetico-materialist investment one step further towards properly inorganic, nonhuman bodies. Interested in the “material agency of natural bodies and technological artefacts”, Bennett does not rest at a transindividual(ising) capacity of the vital forces that she finds in these things (“thing-power”), but thinks of them as impersonal, as being for themselves. Her project here is political […] Politics must be thought, here, an ecology that is made of human and nonhuman agents […] It is at this point that a vitalist-materialist aesthetics of affects and vibrations is paired with an overwhelming concern for a working environmental politics’. This way of looking at politics raises an important point by considering the inorganic on the same level as the organic.
The return to materiality is by no means an animistic, bucolic or mythological turn. In fact, it takes from the New Aesthetics a coldness that is expressed in the use of specialized production processes (commissioned objects, readymades, and so forth). As Karen Archey argues, ‘Just as the anti-form aesthetic of Postminimalism can be read as a response to the chilly remove of Minimalist work, and an attempt to re-assert a haptic or sexual material presence, it could be argued that the artists considered here attempt a similar operation by introducing the concept of emotional and bodily alienation within the discourse dominated by the ready-made, corporate art pursued by many of their contemporaries. […] Perhaps this collection of work responds not to a delayed understanding of how to resolve the networked with flesh, but how to navigate an increasingly impersonal world as a sentient being’.6
Archey points to a historical precedent recently explored by Elena Filipovic in her exhibition Counter Forms: Tetsumi Kudo, Alina Szapocznikov, Paul Thek, Hannah Wilke in New York in autumn 2013. Filipovic writes: ‘[The artists’] immediate context were different, but whether grappling with the implications of post-war America, post-Holocaust Poland, or Post-Hiroshima Japan, their works seem haunted — materially and actually — by their makers’ willing exploration of disaster and disintegration in a way that was quite at odds with the clean, optimistic and perfected forms that more widely circulated in their epoch’.7
In our ‘post-Web, post-AIDS, post-capitalist and post-Fukushima’ times, are we feeling a resurgent need for the emotional charge of matter? In my conversations with the artists in this exhibition, I couldn’t help but notice that they invoked Kudo, Szapocznikov, Thek, and also Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, in tandem with current philosophical debates, video games, video clips and industrial productions.
Formless, as defined by Georges Bataille in 1929 and developed by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois in an exhibition and book in 1996,8 is a way of thinking declassification and displacement, of putting the disorder back into taxonomy of cancelling the oppositions on which logical and categorical thinking is based (form vs content, form vs matter, inside vs outside, and so on). Formlessness operates like a deviant system to explore the limits of the object.
Krauss and Bois sought the Formless in art from the period between 1930 and 1975: Surrealism and beyond, the eccentric objects and assemblages fundamentally linked to materiality and the body (often through bodily fluids). Like many of the works Krauss and Bois selected from the 1960s and 70s, those in Geographies of Contamination are informed by a global contamination of aesthetic categories and a hybridisation of materials and sources – spatially, temporally, and conceptually. Displacement allows a general denial of categories and past taxonomies, while declassification blurs the boundaries between high and low, horizontality and verticality, object and subject, virtual and real, past and present, ignorance and knowledge, activity and passivity, singularity and standardisation.
Although Geographies of Contamination is not organised by categories, its modi operandi are discernible. Horizontality, for instance, opposes the optical bias in art and refers to the base quality of matter. The horizontal is apparent not only in works displayed on the floor (Marlie Mul, Michael E. Smith, and Olga Balema) but in those that refer to the soil (Neil Beloufa, David Douard) or to the role played by gravity and horizontality in their fabrication (Nicolas Deshayes).
Artworks that beat and pulse (Olga Balema, Rachel Rose), that mutate from exhibition to exhibition (David Douard), that are moveable (Neil Beloufa, David Douard) or contaminated by previous works (Renaud Jerez) bring temporality into the visual field. But to catalyse these mutations and transitions, movement is not necessary: once a thing is fragmented and recomposed into new things, a confusion between the animate and the inanimate takes place and the pulse of the uncanny is felt in the work. This is especially so when the human figure, here most often in the status of consumer, can be perceived only as a potentiality or trace in found objects and images (Sam Lewitt, Rachel Rose, Renaud Jerez, Marlie Mul) or “commissioned readymades” (Magali Reus).
Hybridisation and contamination involve the action of fluxes on matter, and in this way are related to the concept of entropy, which describes the inevitable and irreversible degradation of the energy in an isolated system. The second law of thermodynamics has expanded into biological and information theory to signify the gradual evolution of an organism toward an undifferentiated state. As a process of inevitable disintegration, entropy directly threatens the conception of an artwork as an enclosed and autonomous entity. Instead, the artwork is just another thing in the world, contaminated and contaminating.
Geographies of Contamination, and its accompanying programme of talks and events, will explore these dynamics. The purpose of this exhibition is neither to formulate nor to analyse a scene, movement, or generation, but to dig deep into this complex and important question of the rapid mutability of art itself. For this exhibition, I have asked the writer-curators Laura McLean-Ferris and Alexander Scrimgeour to join me and the team at DRAF to reflect on the issue. The hope is to create a project that, far from being a conclusion, can act as an institutional introduction to and participant in a wider discussion of contemporary practices.

I have whirled with the earth at the dawning, When the sky was a vaporous flame; I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name. – H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Nemesis’ A very long time ago Life struck down on our planet to make things jitter and squirm for its amusement. Actually it didn’t strike down as much as it crept along. Then blind Evolution set out on a random, slithering course bumping into stuff, taking detours, modifying, trying again. Reproduction, mutation, reproduction, mutation. But Evolution, it would seem, is a negligent and indifferent force caring neither for the body reproduced nor the body reproducing, only the act of reproduction itself. It is a manic and faulty photocopier.

In the opening scene of George Romero’s Land of the Dead the camera sweeps over what seems to be a desolate landscape. Maybe a park, maybe a fun fair. However, it is not deserted. It is inhabited by a different type of being. The living dead. In a pavilion a group of them have formed something that looks like a band. They play together. They have no idea how to use their instruments. They have no idea of tune nor rhythm. They have no idea of music. But they play nevertheless. A collective affirmation between dead beings. Something new is being articulated. Through their inability, through a loss of history and knowledge, through a collective endeavour. A kind of revolt against the existing order? A refusal? If this collective articulation is a revolt, the music played might be the return of their lost souls.

The exhibition

Skin. A door. Yellow light.

The eggs in the space are all empty. The beings growing inside are long gone. No bodies, only frames and containers. Remains. A deserted landscape. What is left is a silent collective of dead objects. Without a language and the ability to speak. Between the silence of the objects and the tattoo-like statements written on their skin something new is being formulated. Formless. Quiet. A re-framing of words and statements, like whispers. A language articulated by objects. A return. A protest. A reappearing of lost souls. Counter strategies of DIY and hacker culture, teenage behaviour and distortion. Modified objects. Found text and projected images. Artificial environments and constructed collectivity. Infected collages of things, ideas and matter of facts. This is the weave of David Douard. On the skin, always on the skin. On the surface between things and states. As a reflection.

Les installations de David Douard propagent dans l’espace d’exposition toute une population d’éléments bien souvent hétérogènes et tentaculaires au point de coloniser leur environnement.

Matières ou objets, éléments identifiables ou non se mêlent dans des assemblages bricolés, débarrassés du souci de la virtuosité technique, revisitant le « grotesque » comme forme esthétique. Ces hybrides, nés de greffes d’éléments technologiques et organiques, nous donnent à voir des corps en pleine mutation, sorte d’avatars entre deux états ou deux identités, qui ne sont pas sans faire écho à une certaine expérience de l’adolescence.

Une peau de plâtre les recouvre, elle se craquèle, se boursoufle comme travaillée en profondeur par une révolte latente, si ce n’est par l’idée d’un habitat en devenir. David Douard dissémine dans ses installations des images imprimées, des morceaux de films, des bribes de textes, des bandes sons de jeux vidéos trafiquées, autant d’indices d’une occupation domestique des lieux insufflant un simulacre de vie à ses conglomérats anthropomorphiques traversés d’émotions digitales.

David Douard procède par accumulation d’objets, de logos, de codes qu’il s’approprie de sources diverses mais indifférenciées, minutieusement choisis, braconnés lors d’errances dans le flux d’Internet ou simplement glanés au hasard des rencontres, « par accident » tel qu’il aime le souligner. Piochés en grande partie dans le registre de la culture populaire, les signes parsemés nous semblent familiers, sans être pour autant clairement identifiables.

« Animorphs », qui donne son titre à l’exposition, est en effet une série américaine de romans de science-fiction très peu connue en France. Mettant en scène des adolescents dotés de pouvoirs surnaturels, ces livres furent publiés par la maison d’édition Scholastic de 1996 à 2001 et donnèrent lieu à de nombreuses déclinaisons (adaptation télévisée, jeu vidéo, site internet, etc.). Si l’univers déployé par l’artiste présente des affinités avec la série (telles les questions liées à la métamorphose, à l’adolescence, à la rébellion), ce sont essentiellement les rouages de ce système médiatique fondé sur le renouvellement constant des supports et des canaux de diffusion qui l’intéressent. L’exposition ne consiste pas en une transposition d’« Animorphs », cette référence n’étant qu’un point de départ à la dérive plastique et artistique de David Douard. « Animorphs » représente « une métaphore plutôt ludique de la manière dont l’histoire des médias et des technologies s’enregistre dans nos corps, et inversement ».

À l’instar des pratiques relevant du hacking, David Douard développe des dispositifs rhizomatiques au sein desquels les référents mis en scène sont des prétextes manipulés et déformés, se jouant d’échos formels, comme contaminés par un virus provoquant des glissements de sens propices aux projections fictionnelles.

Langage structuré au récit manifeste pour les uns, ou image muette à propos de laquelle on peut vaguement dire quelque chose pour les autres, l’art est, à la manière du Vicomte Pourfendu de Calvino, un terrain d’opération tranché aux lignes de front cependant perméables, qui oppose depuis toujours deux factions antagonistes. Les uns rejettent l’idée selon laquelle il y aurait autre chose que le langage qui puisse raconter. Les autres, à l’image de Nelson Goodman, pensent que les œuvres d’art exemplifient des formes, des sentiments, des idées et construisent des mondes. Vieux débat que celui-ci. Insoluble. Les récits ont toujours cherché l’explication du monde. D’abord les mythes, puis les dieux et les légendes, et l’Histoire enfin. Et aussi, à l’évidence, tout ce qui relève du langage articulé ou non, dit ou lu ou tu : l’hystérie, la poésie, la littérature, la pensée… Mais les images ? Que disent-elles ? Que nous raconte la Bataille d’Alexandre d’Altdorfer ? Nous dit-elle que depuis Issus et la période hellénistique jusqu’à Guillaume IV de Bavière, rien n’a changé, que c’est toujours le même truc et qu’il faut réinventer l’Histoire ? Que nous révèle le Baptême du Christ de Piero della Francesca ? Que la Concorde est bien fragile entre l’Orient et l’Occident ou que l’esprit est un ? Nous disent-elles tout cela, ces images, ou ne nous disent-elles rien de tout cela ? Mais que ce soit l’Œuvre qui raconte ou l’Histoire qui parle, il y a quelque chose malgré tout, ici, qui ressemble à s’y méprendre à un récit. Le Texte C’est au mi-temps des années 80 du siècle dernier qu’apparaît un nouvel héros « universel » : le Texte. Il est né de l’union hiérogamique du structuralisme européen et de la textualité universitaire états-unienne, mais il gagne bientôt le reste du monde pour devenir un « intertexte », puis un « supra texte » généralisé avant d’être le « cybertexte » des réseaux que l’on connaît. Fredric Jameson le dira comme ça : « L’ancien langage de l’“œuvre” – œuvre d’art, chef-d’œuvre – se voit partout remplacé par le langage assez différent du “texte”, des textes et de la textualité. Un langage dont est stratégiquement exclue la réalisation de la forme organique ou monumentale. Aujourd’hui, tout peut être un texte en ce sens (la vie quotidienne, le corps, les représentations politiques), alors que les objets qui étaient auparavant des “œuvres” sont désormais susceptibles d’être relus comme d’immenses ensembles ou systèmes de textes de diverses sortes »1. Ainsi, la « dictature » du futur, portée jusque-là par une Histoire messianique, celle de l’époque moderne, pour laquelle le futur éclairait le présent à l’aune de ce qu’il promettait (à coup sûr, des lendemains radieux), s’effondre au profit d’un récit infini qui englobe le maintenant, l’événement, et bien sûr également l’image et l’art. Et c’est à cet instant précis, qu’apparaissent soudain de nouveaux modes de composition de récits visuels dont les artistes s’emparent, ou plutôt que les artistes inventent. Ainsi, brusquement, ils grimpent aux murs, filment, portent des masques, dessinent, sculptent, tout cela simultanément. Ils construisent, déplacent, méandrent, concentrent et superposent des temporalités, des supports et des ombres, et des inversions, déplient et dévoilent. Et ensuite, ils découvrent une complexité qui est celle des temporalités du monde et des microrécits qui l’informent. Mais quoi qu’ils fassent, ils racontent – on peut ainsi dire qu’ils transmettent. Raconte-moi une histoire Pour Gunnar B. Kvaran, poser récit à côté de transmission c’est par conséquent énoncer l’évidence de ce qui se passe (« Le réel est ce qui se passe », dit le philosophe). Au néo-modernisme qui emplit nos murs et les patine d’une douce nostalgie, Gunnar B. Kvaran oppose une nouvelle attention à la forme. Car c’est une forme inédite de pensée. Et la forme de cette pensée est probablement ce qui dit le plus. Les histoires peuvent être bonnes, mais ce qui les distingue au bout du compte, on le sait, c’est la pertinence de leur forme, car c’est elle qui crée le sens en formant le récit. Le Petit Prince a dit : « Raconte-moi une histoire », et le poète l’a dessinée.

A
Rosalind Krauss, in Formless: A Userʼs Guide (1997), mentions “de-classing” as a way of decategorizing
forms: “The other word to which Bataille turned to evoke this process of ʻdevianceʼ
was informe, a de-classing in every sense of the term: in the separation between space and time;
in the systems of spatial mapping; in the qualifications of matter; in the structural order of
systems.”
B
De-classing has become a prominent international style. Proposing a different relationship to
materiality, some sort of deviant systems are at stake in the works, exploring the limits of objects
and assemblages, exploring uncommon spaces of possibility. Fluids, liquids, deliquescence (as
motifs, materials or images) become the metaphors for the global contamination of aesthetic
categories that once formed a (no longer) valid grid to understand contemporaneity and its
forms. De-classing is an attempt to formalize the deny (or deconstruction) of taxonomies, of
boundaries and differentiations between high and low, horizontality and verticality, object and
image, virtual and real, past and present, ignorance and knowledge, activity and passivity,
singularity and standardization, etc. An important tool for this is often to be found in the “readyweb”:
the intrusion of a unlimited resource, a global access effectively operating an effective declassing
of cognitive systems, as well as, in reverse, accelerating a surprising return to
materiality.
C
Tension between singularity and standardization is particularly echoed into a temporal
irresolution in the works. An indecision that Gilles Deleuzeʼs concept of the “crystal-image”
echoes. The crystal-image, originally employed to discuss cinema, is a shot that fuses the
pastness of the recorded event with the presentness of its viewing. The crystal-image is the
indivisible unity of the virtual image and the actual image. The virtual image is subjective, in the
past, and recollected. The virtual image as « pure recollection » exists outside of consciousness,
in time. It is always somewhere in the temporal past, but still alive and ready to be « recalled » by
an actual image. The actual image is objective, in the present, and perceived. The crystal-image
always lives at the limit of an indiscernible actual and virtual image. The crystal-image shapes
time as a constant two-way mirror that splits the present into two heterogeneous directions, « one
of which is launched towards the future while the other falls into the past. Time consists of this
split, and it is … time, that we see in the crystal » (Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 81). Using
Deleuzeʼs concept we could speak of crystal-object.
D
The works, and their often multiple, contradictory, simultaneous forms and concepts (as infused
by their materials, techniques, colours and their inner symbolism, the way they are shown, the way they are discussed, the way they are documented, etc) are “crystal-objects”, fluctuating
between actual and virtual, recording or dealing with conscious or involuntary memories,
confusing mental and physical time. Post-modernism & Conceptual Art & formless & Greenberg
& etc. All together, mixed and re-informed, de-classing and crystal-objects.

Each work is a construction of overlapping layers to simulate dense beings made to recreate their factual existence and to escape materiality. A poetic revolt that lies in nonsenses, manifestations of exuberance and primitive impulses. Pointing to something far away from us the works remind us how important is freedom, metaphysical infinity, idealism and emotions. The show wants to be a meditation on ‘the ordinary’ and intends to put together works that exhibit the characteristics of extended or altered prototypes infused with a fair amount of desuetude and unfamiliarity.
Berlin based Korean artist Sunah Choi presents an installation that comprises of a projection of constantly changing images that are live randomly generated without an agent. The results are silhouettes in motion whose beauty lie in the act of transforming the state of ordinary things.
In his works David Douard creates mysterious artifacts and particularly rich and original ecosystems where the biological and the technological coexist. Bodies, machines, and their components become the replaceable elements of a scenery which is primitive, futuristic and out of time.
Daniel Keller’s stacked rocks or cairns, an ancient symbol of ‘value-adding’ human intervention on the landscape, are ornaments purchased from leading e-commerce site (and chief disruptor of traditional brick-and-mortar retail) Amazon.com and delivered directly to the gallery. The work playfully addresses the shifting role of the post-studio ‘prosumer’ artist in the global networked economy, assuming the familiar guise of the minimalist readymade.
‘Sistema S’ (S System) by Andrea Magnani is an installation composed by several elements in connection with a brass cylinder used for making black soap bubbles. The work, inspired by the genesis of the solar system, reconstructs a workshop performed before the show to carry out experiments attempting to bring together chemistry, symbology and mysticism.
Young American artist Mel Nguyen uses the cyanotype, a 20th-century printing process, to create mysterious graphic compositions. The fascinating process lends to the works a pictorial value and multiplies the possible readings.
South Korean-born artist Anicka Yi’s work is motivated by the tension and interplay between value and values, materials and materialism, consumption and waste. Familiar objects are suspended in by a block of glycerin living a sense of muddy relics of everyday life.

Everything is more pleasant now that it is warm outside. The sun rises over Oslo. Light green trees shoot leaves sending a thin mist of pollen through the city. Birds nest in the cracks between buildings, under the eaves of houses, on steel beams and concrete ledges, their constant cooing is heard almost everywhere. A badger rummages through a row of trashcans: “I am an animal,” he says in his thick badger accent. Sunbeams through the skylights draw semicircles on the northern wall, dipping further down towards the floor for each day that passes, and marking on the horizontal outlines of the plank formwork molded into the concrete a sundial of the day and a calendar of summer.

A small crowd has gathered to interpret the signs and portents of the sun, but only one of them is speaking. He reads to the others the law, a different law, and proclaims himself king of a different world: Akhenaten, the beautiful one under the sun. Faltering notes from a nylon-string guitar are heard. It sounds like du-dududu, short pause, dududu-dududu-du, “no” dududu-du – a beginner’s level version of Stairway to Heaven.

Curfew tolls the knell of parting day
the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea
the ploughman homeward plods his weary way
and leaves the world to darkness and to me
fades the glimmering landscape on the sight
all the a stillness holds5ave where the beetle wheels his droning flight
drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower
moping owl does to the moon complain owl owl
suck wandering near her secret bower
Molest her ancient solitary reign
Beneath those rugged elms that yew-tree’s shade Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap Each in his narrow cell for ever laid
The rude Forefathers of the bastards’sleep
ASS call o obscene-DUMMY
swallow twittering from the straw-built shed
cock’s shrill clarion-or the echoing horn
more^mADY shall rouse them from their lowly bed

Fordick no morlazing hearth shall burn
busy housewife ply her evening care
No children run to lisp their innocent-soul-return Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share
Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke How jocund did they drive their team afield bow’d the woods beneath their sturdy stroke
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil
homely joys and destiny obscure
hear with a disdainful smile
short and simple annals of the Poor
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of po-
short and simple annals of the Poor -wer
And all that beauty all that wealth e’er gave Awaits alike th’ inevitable hour:-
paths of glory lead but to the grave
storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour’s voice provoke the silent dust,
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire; Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre:
But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page, Rich with the spoils of time, did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
Some mute inglorious here may rest
Some lowfie guiltless of his counry’s blood
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife
Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture dick’d, And many a holy text around she strews
That teach the rustic moralist to die.

For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey This pleasing anxious being e’er resign’d,
For thee, who, mindful of th’ unhonour’d dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate;
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate, –
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn;
“There at the foot of yonder nodding beech That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high. His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
“Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove; Now drooping, woeful wa
Or crazed with care, or cross’d in hopeless love. “One morn I miss’d him on the custom’d hill, Along the heath, and near his favourite tree; Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he;
“The next with dirges due in sad array
Slow through the ghetto borne,-

Approach and read (for thou canst read) the lay Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn. new kids wa born. wildly
the bastards creatures. wild shadows underneath. children lost. Street did.
they are here.
mo lick MADY MO SICK IN DUMNY’

En présentant des oeuvres faisant référence à des objets fonctionnels et non plus seulement esthétiques, ce format joue sur les rapports entre valeur artistique et valeur d’usage.
L’exposition se déploie suivant deux temporalités différentes. Le premier mode d’apparition est une insertion discrète dans les quatre expositions précédentes: pour chacune d’elles, une pièce, produite pour le Polder à venir, est déjà présentée mais de manière indiscernable puisque reliée à sa valeur d’usage. L’objet occupe dans l’exposition une place ambiguë puisqu’il y possède une autre fonction que celle d’une oeuvre d’art: qu’il s’agisse d’un bureau ou d’un bibliothèque, d’une machine à café ou d’un présentoir, il infiltre clandestinement une autre programmation. Dans un second temps, la production de ces objets est rendue publique à l’occasion d’une sorte d’exposition rétrospective qui, en les coupant de leur fonction, fera basculer les mêmes objets dans le champ de l’art

Through rapid synapse, irony and ease of access to a turbo-archive
of open- source images, the production of an emerging generation
of international ar- tists converges towards the construction of a
new system, in which – having absorbed quotes and outcomes
of the past, the new frontiers of communica- tion, information
technology, the internet, the swirling aesthetics of hypermar- kets
and fast consumption – the prospection of an archeology of the
future is defined, focusing on gargantuan assimilation and the
physical or virtual rende- ring of change taking place. A product of
this transformation, art no longer seems to have a form, or rather
seems to have many. Teleportation, demate- rialization and rematerialization
are presented as the fundamental processes of
the artistic act. Bodies and objects appear hence disembodied, the
very matter is reduced from molecules to pixels, from substance to
image. Video, painting, sculpture, and installation interchange their
codes and formulas in a communal primordial soup, into which the
image streams crossing the current everyday life converge into a
new form, a new place and a new time.

From MARK BARROW’s Re-productions, in which painting
seems reduced to its basic codes, we go to TORBEN RIBE’s
installation abstractions, passing by ANDREA KVAS’s unstructured
conformations paintings or NICOLAS DESHAYES’s resins, intended
to return animal fossils. The moving image undergoes en- dless
transformations, like in the work of IAN CHENG, who detects in
a future primitivism the scenario ahead of us. Or, like in DAVID
DOUARD’s case, insists on the relationship between real and virtual
dimension. It is instead reduced to pure language in the video story
by DEXTER SINISTER, in a paradoxical con- temporary iconoclasm.
The everyday, familiar and domestic object, appears like the leftover
of a distant time in the past or in the future, the trace of a moment
unconnected to reality: this is the case of MARGARET LEE’s
installations or BILLY RENNEKAMP’s assemblages, the results of
metamorphoses genera- ted by the flowing of time. Or the result of
genetic contamination, like in JIMMY LIMIT’s still lifes. The idea of
the musealization of an endless book collection can be found in the
work of HARIS EPAMINONDA AND DANIEL GUSTAV CRAMER, who
reflect on the cataloguing of an image database to be preserved in
the future; TIMUR SI-QIN further insists on the idea of a past that
will be rebuilt through new platforms, when the origins of the world
will not re- main but in small traces. This scenario is finally resolved in a utopia of the pre- sent in the project of GUNDAM AIR, an artist
who, in his folly, dematerializes his present being to talk with works
projected in a future dimension. The threads of time are interwoven
with no apparent order, just like the spatial coordinates are muddled,
giving rise to an entropy of references and allusions which leads the
eye and the mind into a time machine out of control.

Bétonsalon : Quand l’idée de travailler à partir des films du cinéaste scientifique Jean Comandon (1877-1970) nous a été soumise par Béatrice de Pastre des Archives françaises du film (CNC) et Thierry Lefebvre, enseignant-chercheur de l’Université Paris Diderot, nous avons souhaité t’inviter à interpréter et scénographier son oeuvre cinématographique. L’invention d’un dispositif permettant de filmer l’infiniment petit lui a ouvert les portes de sujets tels que la croissance des plantes, le mouvement des cellules ou encore la faune microscopique, donnant lieu à près de 400 films tantôt abstraits, tantôt pédagogiques qui ont nourri l’imaginaire collectif. Qu’est-ce qui t’a intéressé dans notre proposition de t’inscrire dans cette oeuvre et quelles connexions as-tu vues entre le travail de Jean Comandon et le tien ? David Douard : Je ne connaissais pas du tout Jean Comandon. Ce qui m’intéresse dans son oeuvre est l’ingéniosité de son dispositif de prise de vues et l’imaginaire qui y réside. C’est une manipulation et une formalisation intéressantes pour un artiste dans la mesure où cela intègre des médiums de cinéma et de picturalité. Sans tomber dans le cliché de ce type d’esthétique, son travail me plaît dans sa manière de plonger dans la recherche microscopique, purement et simplement. Cette recherche d’intériorité est ce qui relie ma pratique à la sienne. Une chose qui m’a très vite intéressé dans son travail est son étude de la peau lors de ses débuts à l’hôpital Saint-Louis1. Avec l’aide de sa caméra, Comandon perfore cette surface et entre à l’intérieur pour donner à voir tout ce qui y grouille. Dans mon travail et dans la sculpture en général c’est plutôt la surface de l’objet et les informations que cette même surface nous donne sur l’intériorité qui m’intéressent. BS : Comment as-tu choisi d’aborder cette invitation et comment envisages-tu d’articuler les points de connexion que tu viens d’évoquer entre l’oeuvre de Comandon et la tienne ? DD : Mon point de départ était de créer une constellation d’artistes autour de Jean Comandon, mais pour diverses raisons le projet s’est peu à peu transformé. Mon approche aujourd’hui est de restituer le travail cinématographique de Comandon en incluant également des documents annexes (par exemple les dessins de Comandon avant leur enregistrement sur pellicule ou ceux du dessinateur O’Galop, avec qui Comandon a travaillé2). À l’intérieur de ce dispositif, je fais référence à des praticiens qui m’intéressent, mais sans montrer leurs travaux directement, sans dire qu’ils sont là. Je pense par exemple à l’oeuvre du réalisateur Derek Jarman, aux dessins mescaliniens d’Henri Michaux ou encore à Andrew Miller, un inventeur qui travaille actuellement en microscopie sur l’iPhone avec le projet SkyLight. BS : Comment relierais-tu Derek Jarman à Jean Comandon ? DD : Le lien entre Derek Jarman et Jean Comandon est le fond de couleur monochrome comme support de recherche. Comandon a utilisé le fond noir dans certains de ses films3 et animations pour incruster des images microscopiques. Dans son film Blue (1993), Derek Jarman va, lui, substituer l’écran à sa pure matière, c’est-à-dire le fond bleu. Pendant une heure et demie, il partage ses pensées sur un fond imperturbablement bleu. L’exposition fait notamment référence à l’histoire du début de la couleur dans le cinéma et de l’incrustation d’objets grâce à un fond. C’est de là que commence le dialogue entre Comandon et moi, l’idée étant d’étirer de manière élastique des anecdotes comme celle-ci pour leur donner une autre matière. BS : L’exposition montrera un certain nombre de films de Jean Comandon. Pourrais-tu commenter ton choix sur un fonds de quelque deux cents films ? DD : C’est le médium de l’écran actuel qui m’a aidé de sélectionner les films de Comandon. Je veux dire que le choix des films s’est fait en imaginant que la matière filmique est en adhésion avec la matière « réelle » des écrans. Par exemple, un film microscopique s’allie parfaitement au magnétisme du téléviseur cathodique ou encore aux câbles de l’écran plat. Montrer les films de Comandon sur écran plat est une manipulation qui, sans toucher au film lui-même, montre l’amalgame entre la machine et l’organique, unis en un hybride. Ce sont là des spéculations un peu folles, mais il s’agit de rendre au travail de Comandon une visibilité étrange et inattendue. De manière générale, mon idée était de trouver un système qui éviterait de rentrer dans la contemplation du cinéma. Les films microscopiques de Comandon ont une qualité abstraite ; ils se regardent comme des molécules, comme un ballet, une danse. Les montrer isolés par rapport au reste de son oeuvre serait la chose la plus attendue dans le cadre d’une exposition. Au lieu de ça, j’ai souhaité prendre des films apparentés à chacune des périodes de production de Comandon – Pathé, Albert Kahn, l’Institut Pasteur… – et en avoir un dans chaque style : des films de microscopie, de vulgarisation, des dessins animés, des films pédagogiques. BS : Outre la matière filmique, as-tu pensé à l’environnement de travail de Jean Comandon, les autres paramètres de sa vie, son histoire. Y aura-t-il d’autres matériaux appartenant à Comandon que tu intégreras dans l’exposition ?
DD : Il y un objet en particulier qui m’a intéressé. C’est un tube de 10 cm dont l’usage est incertain, mais qui a probablement fait partie de la machinerie créée par Comandon ; c’est le grand inconnu de sa collection. Comme le fond monochrome, ce tube est pour moi un point de départ. Il va contaminer l’espace qui l’entoure par l’absence qu’il va créer et mon travail sera de disséminer autour de lui des écrans et des machines de bureautique actuelles, en somme des éléments non pas de prise de vues (ce à quoi servait ce tube), mais plutôt une machinerie servant à visionner.
Le rapport à l’écran joue une grande part dans le dispositif et surtout, il concerne une génération dont je fais partie. Aujourd’hui la technologie doit être avant tout tributaire de la recherche et des besoins de l’humanité et c’est bien pour ça que mon point de départ est cette forme de vie par l’écran. Quand je regarde les utilisations du dernier iPhone comme outil de microscopie « démocratisée » (je me réfère ici de nouveau au programme SkyLight qui sert à relier un microscope à un smartphone), je pense directement à Comandon et son désir de transmettre un savoir biologique au plus grand nombre dans un but de démocratisation. Aujourd’hui deux pôles m’attirent : l’utilisation des smartphones à but biologique et l’amour quasi sentimental qu’un être humain donne à son appareil numérique ; il y a, dans les deux sens, incorporation du vivant dans la machine. J’ai en mémoire cette image trouvée sur internet d’un homme tenant son téléphone muni d’une optique « microscope » contre sa peau. Une image de tissus de peau remplit l’écran ; comme adopté, l’ « android » est le prolongement de l’être. Dans tous les cas, la question qui réside est ce qu’il y a derrière ; derrière l’écran, derrière la peau. BS : Tu compares les objets qui ont servi à Jean Comandon à des technologies actuelles dont la finalité te semble similaire : une connaissance du corps. Comment ton travail répondra t-il à ce rapport entre le biologique et la machine que tu vois dans l’oeuvre de Comandon ?
DD : Pour montrer au mieux les films de Comandon, je pars de l’hypothèse que tout a une consistance, que tout est organisme, et que ce même organisme, si hybride soit-il, se perce et s’explore. Il faut s’immiscer dans une recherche en profondeur et s’autoriser pas mal de choses, un peu à la manière de Joe Dante dans le film Innerspace (1987) qui retrace le voyage de Dennis Quaid, miniaturisé et contenu dans une capsule de 0,02 mm, dans le corps de Martin Short.
Pour en revenir à l’exposition, ma proposition est de faire des objets hybrides entre la sculpture et le dispositif. Mes sculptures-installations seront des présences dans l’espace, avec des surfaces, des choses qui encore une fois signifient la peau, cette surface à perforer. Je suis intéressé par l’idée de travailler avec les émotions, les problèmes, les sensations, toutes les irrégularités du corps et de l’esprit, et de les rendre visible de la même manière qu’un scientifique révélerait un atome. Ce sont des intuitions qui, je pense, suivent la lignée des dessins mescaliniens de Michaux, ces passages temporels de l’esprit mis en images. L’élément fédérateur de cette exposition consisterait donc en un va-et-vient entre une objectivation des mouvements intérieurs et une surinterprétation singulière des sensations contenues.

Cartographie mentale
David Douard constitue un corpus d’œuvres qui, comme il le dit lui-même, définit « un univers romantique et pâle (…) où les corps bougent et les pensées dérivent ». Ses accrochages prennent la forme de dispositifs, dans lesquels se déploient vidéos, textes, images imprimées ou sculptures. Son langage principal est l’écriture, souvent mis en parallèle avec un travail de mise en espace. Écrire sur une page blanche est aussi important pour lui qu’investir un espace d’exposition, ce qui lui permet de balancer entre un espace de projection mentale et une matérialisation dans l’espace physique.
Une de ses œuvres récentes, Fall (2011), est une pièce sculpturale et contextuelle : un tasseau de bois appuyé contre un mur blanc est recouvert d’une chemise bleue, surmonté d’une ampoule cassée et accompagné d’un morceau de plâtre posé en équilibre précaire. Cette œuvre, typique d’une pratique d’atelier, assemblage à première
vue hétéroclite, est assez représentative de
la pratique de David Douard, qui crée une narration à long terme, disséminant des objets fragmentaires, prélevés dans le quotidien, sur un parcours poétique.
Comme on peut le voir avec le film HD, Dream Talk Anna (2010), dans lequel une voix vient hanter un objet en décrivant ses contours au fil de sa propre pensée. Cette alternance de plans-séquences au son d’une voix-off, comme désincarnée, illustre bien la manière dont travaille l’artiste, une gestuelle libre et intuitive étant à l’origine de la plupart de ses projets.
Dans Sans titre (2010, film 16 mm), courte séquence projetée en boucle, une plante (la Monstera ou « ananas du pauvre », qui a comme particularité d’envahir l’espace dans lequel elle se trouve) apparaît comme un bas-relief en
noir sur fond noir, avant de laisser place à une séquence de danse proche de la transe – dont la chorégraphie est inspirée par un texte de
l’artiste. L’alternance des deux séquences crée un rapport optique que l’artiste estime être hérité de Fluxus.
Pour le Salon de Montrouge, David Douard expose un nouveau film, accompagné d’un banc, de photogrammes et de textes inédits proposés à la fois sous forme imprimée et sonore. L’ensemble est défini comme un
« dispositif mental », la mise en place très simple de différents médiums disséminés sous forme de display, se contaminant les uns les autres.
Cette dénomination de « display » est symptomatique de l’art de l’exposition des années 2000, une « pratique de l’exposition comme installation, l’exposition étant en soi le contenu, le système de référence et production de sens de l’art contemporain » (Maïté Vissault). L’artiste s’approprie parfaitement le terme, proposant au visiteur une expérience à la fois sensorielle et sensible.