"Choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel defines contemporary art as a way of finding new forms to speak about reality and about our planet."
Exhibition from June 30 to July 28, 2018
LAIA ABRIL
LAURENCE AËGERTER
CARMELA GARCIA
KATINKA LAMPE
MÉLANIE PAVY
SMITH
CHRISTER STRÖMHOLM
This exhibition presents the work of artists whose gaze has been directed toward the gaze of others. We will move from one look to another, from one story to the next. The first stories, documentary in nature, are summoned by these creators who draw on them to produce new narratives. Thus, one story begins where the documentation of another ends. Through the publication of these new narratives, the artists transform this material into archives, give new meaning to existing images, and thereby create singular tributes to the passage of time and to what remains.
Press articles, old photographs, illustrations from an anthropology book or a tourism guide, a renowned photographic series from the 1960s, a 16th-century Madonna painting...
These materials serve as the starting point for these artists, who begin where others have stopped History and suspended their storytelling. By retracing the path and following the last steps, they have chosen either to return to it or to depart from it to drift elsewhere. They have chosen these traces to rewrite, with a contemporary vocabulary, history as it passes into the present—the contemporary version of a classic archived story.
Some will even seize the intangible matter that is memory—the mental image, impalpable and fleeting, of events whose memory is what is preserved and expressed here. This memory becomes the material to shape, more than the documents that might attest to it. On the border between art and documentary, certain works are born and realized through a dual interpretation of a subjective experience of reality.
A definition of contemporary art by choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel* is to find new forms to tell reality, to speak about the world. The world evolves; the forms to express it must evolve resolutely. When artists question these new forms of existence, they question the past in relation to the present, the before through the after, the present through possible futures. They both chronicle and bear witness. It is about two times, two sets of people and characters, facts and scenarios, the profane and the sacred, exegesis of material.
It is about back-and-forths—from reality to staging, from documentary to fiction, from language to writing, from reproduction to transformation. A poetic drift.
— Charlotte Boudon
