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fonds régional d'art contemporain
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emily wardill / the hands of a clock, even when out of order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand, otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache
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Opening: February 2 2012 from 6 pm
Exhibition curator: Florence Derieux
The philosophical, political and psychoanalytic concepts form the very essence of Emily Wardill's films. They retrace a history of thought by means of multiple narrations, embellished with numerous soundtracks composed by the artist. Her filmic grammar is mysterious, to say the least, because the classic codes of interpretation are obsolete. We therefore have to penetrate into what seems to be a fascinating representation of the unconscious. Several levels of narration intertwine, often evoking Fassbinderian forms of melodrama, and allowing us to associate an eminently political idea with more popular visual references. All of her work thus seems to be a vast scientific experiment that catapults the spectator into a suspension between the initial premise and the final result, there, where the irrational becomes a requirement for being able to understand a given situation.
For her first exhibition in a French institution, entitled The Hands Of A Clock, Even When Out Of Order, Must Know And Let The Dumbest Little Watch Know Where They Stand, Otherwise Neither Is A Dial But Only A White Face With A Trick Mustache, Emily Wardill notably presents her latest film, Fulll Firearms (90', HD), commissioned by If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam), Serpentine Gallery (London) and Film London's FLAMIN Productions, and co-produced by Arts Council England - Film London Artists' Moving Image Network and City Projects (London) with support from M HKA (Antwerp), Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe), FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims), the Culture Programme of the European Commission (Brussels) and the Mondrian Foundation (Amsterdam).
Emily Wardill's new long form film utilizes the form of the melodrama to tell the story of Imelda, a woman in her 40s who inherits a fortune from her father, a successful arms manufacturer. With her inheritance she sets about building a house to accommodate the ghosts of the people killed by weapons produced by her father's company. Whilst the house is being built a number of people move in and squat the half finished property. Imelda's perception of the squatters is skewed - she isn't hostile to their presence because she simply sees them as the ghosts she expected. The film's narrative is built around the relationship between Imelda and the architect she hires to design the house. He indulges her every whim despite being aware that she is delusional. Fulll Firearms cleverly interlaces the themes of deception, storytelling and displacement. Elements related to the film complete the exhibition.
The exhibition also introduces the film The Pips, 2011, (3 min 39 sec, 16mm) as well as a series of sculptural digital prints of silk related to this fascinating work. The Pips explores movement and the materiality of it, the instigation of one and the duration of the other. Shot in black and white on 16mm, then transferred to a digital projection, this film focuses on British gymnastics champion, Francesca Jones. The film begins with a straight depiction of Jones' routine; the patterns created by her ribbon baton trace her movements in the air. It is a reflection of her actions, imitating her and existing because of her. Near the end of the film, the gymnast's body becomes stretched, elongated and distorted ultimately breaking into a series of mutant parts. Her face remains unfathomed and she gives no acknowledgement to her own decay. As Jones's becomes still, her actions take on their own identity; their materiality deconstructed by Wardill's emphasis on the physical replication of movement. The body and its motions become contained in the object, revealing an inherent plasticity in the gymnast's performance.
Born in Rugby (the United Kingdom) in 1977, Emily Wardill lives and works in London, where she is Senior Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art. Over the last years, she has produced important monographic exhibitions, including Windows broken, Break, Broke Together in 2010 at the De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, and Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck in 2007 at the ICA in London. Her work has also been exhibited at the Tate Britain and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, Witte de With in Rotterdam, Kunsthalle Basel, and the Reykjavik Art Museum. She is represented by Jonathan Viner Gallery (London), Standard (Oslo) and Altman Siegel Gallery (San Fransisco).
Emily Wardill's exhibition has received support from Fluxus, the Franco-British fund for contemporary art, the British Council and Standard, Oslo.
With support from Champagne Pommery
ciprian muresan / recycled playground
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Opening: Thursday 22 September 2011 from 6 pm
Exhibition curator: Florence Derieux
Ciprian Mureșan belongs to the generation of the post-Communist regime and is, in a post-conceptual manner, preoccupied with the historical and political fallout for his country, Romania.
Mureșan appropriates historical, social and cultural references (essentially artistic, literary and cinematographic), which he re-contextualizes. He analyses the mechanisms of cultural diffusion; the ambivalent, if not contrary relationships between memories of recent history and those of actual experience, in addition to the relationships between political power, religious power, and civil society. His works allude to iconic works from the history of modernity, while addressing questions ranging from the jolts of contemporary society and the fall of utopias to the impact of new technologies on our visual culture, by way of the fetishization of cartoons and the relationship of civil society to different forms of power. He deals with history, religion and art using simple gestures and methods from popular culture with the same quasi-expiatory manner, while restoring the importance of personal experience and expression.
On the occasion of his very first exhibition in France, Ciprian Mureșan will appropriate the exhibition space of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, bringing together the largest selection of works ever shown. Thus, he will introduce an original project that will extend over the ground floor, while the upper level will show works in a plurality both of created forms – film and video, photography, works on paper – and subjects treated by Mureșan.
This exhibition is co-produced by the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, the Centre d’art contemporain Geneva (Switzerland) and the Contemporary Art Gallery Vancouver (Canada), where it will be presented in 2012.
Born in Dej in 1977, Ciprian Mureșan lives and works in Cluj-Napoca (Romania). His work has recently been exhibited at the Secession in Vienna, the NBK in Berlin, the Wyspa Institute of Art in Gdansk, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Renaissance Society in Chicago, at the Centro Cultural Montehermoso in Vitoria, at Witte de With in Rotterdam and at The New Museum in New York. Ciprian Mure¸san also exhibited in the Romania Pavillon Roumain as part of the 53rd Venice Biennial and participated in the 17th Sydney Biennial. He is represented by Plan B in Cluj and Berlin, Andreiana Mihail Gallery in Bucharest, Nicodim Gallery in Los Angeles, Wilkinson Gallery in London and David Nolan Gallery in New York.
Supported by Champagne Pommery
Exhibition view : Click here
julien carreyn / lyot - nick mauss / disorder
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Opening Thursday May 12th, 2011 at 6pm
Curator : Florence Derieux
The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne simultaneously presents two personal exhibitions. One is dedicated to the French artist Julien Carreyn (born in 1973 ; lives and works in Paris) and the other to the German-American artist Nick Mauss (born in 1980 ; lives and works in New York).
Following upon the example of Fernand Khnopff, the Belgian Symbolist – whose compositions are peopled with hieratic, inaccessible women with troubled expressions, or landscapes invoking the world of dreams – the images of Julien Carreyn conjure up a past that no longer exists, engulfed in a wave of memories. He photographs models whom he has placed in object-filled interiors of high symbolic and cultural value. Then comes a lengthy, solitary and meticulous process in the studio, using obsolete printing techniques, through which drawings and photographs are assembled in series and displayed under glass like cultural relics.
Nick Mauss uses the accumulation of ideas, memories and influences as a technique, developing an artistic approach that is at once mechanical, poetic, dreamlike, and almost incantatory. He considers his works on paper and those he refers to as “amplified drawings” (his sculptures, paintings, videos and installations) as so many parts of a developing vocabulary, resolutely anchored in the present. Yet they are often perceived of as originating from a past that should possibly either be eradicated or become a source of emulation. He takes in the exhibition space, which he treats as an object oscillating between a mental and emotional space, sensual, historical and artistic, like a blank page that is the beginning of a design.
Julien Carreyn and Nick Mauss share the same imaginary and aesthetic desire. They are particularly interested in old or rudimentary reproduction techniques. Both have chosen to favour drawing as a creative process in attempting to create a new language. Erudite and all-consuming, it is through the fusion of multiple references that they produce works assuming a falsely quaint aspect, combining abstraction with figuration. Their work associates a certain fragmented realism with images of dreams and the unconscious, yet with the special quality of remaining perfectly open.
Julien Carreyn has notably participated in exhibitions at the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard in Paris (Une Expédition, curated by Stéphane Calais, 2009), at the Mac/Val de Vitry-sur-Seine (FRAC Ile-de-France Collection, 2008) and at the CNEAI in Chatou (Salons boudoirs et antichambres, 2002). He has published several art books, including Les Demoiselles de Vienne, in collaboration with Pierre la Police (Editions Cornélius, Paris, 2008). He is represented by the Galerie Crèvecœur in Paris.
Nick Mauss’s work has been shown at the Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, at the Kunsthalle Basel (Strange Comfort (Afforded by the Profession), 2010), at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (Greater New York and The Baghdad Batteries, 2010), at the Halle für Kunst in Lüneburg (Provence « O », 2010), at the Kunsthalle in Zurich (Non-Solo Show, Non-Group Show, 2009) and at the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York (Contemporary Drawings Collection, 2009). He is represented by the Galerie Neu in Berlin and 303 Gallery in New York.
This exhibition is supported by Champagne Taittinger
tom burr / gravity moves me
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Opening on Thursday 3 February 2011 from 6 pm
Curator : Florence Derieux
Gravity Moves Me is the first institutional exhibition of the American artist Tom Burr in France. It includes works that have been created especially for the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne’s exhibition spaces.
Tom Burr’s work (sculpture, installations, photography, collages, drawings) revisits the formal vocabulary of the Avant-garde and Neo-Avant-garde, and mixes references to literature, film and music, Pop iconography, homosexual culture, underground aesthetics, architecture, design and fashion. His conceptual investigation questions the manner in which identity, particularly sexual identity, is constructed, or whether conversely it is constrained by society and its physical spaces. He reformulates the appropriation of the art of the 1980s as a means of returning to works of the past, allowing for the revelation of different meanings. In this way, he reconfigures a story that is no longer frozen in time and space, but is rather perfectly open, and allowing for the illumination and transformation of the present.
Though the works in the Gravity Moves Me exhibition are intrinsically linked to each other, they are also directly connected to Deep Purple, a monumental sculpture which Tom Burr created in 2000 and which has been installed in the courtyard of the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne since 2008. It is therefore through the angle of the “effect” of the passage of time, both on bodies as well as on the objects surrounding them, that the artist conceives of the notion of “gravity”. This word describes the influence of weight on a given body, but it can also be understood as referring to a cerebral state describing serious, sombre, sometimes even morbid thoughts. Paradoxically, these very thoughts can give rise to a sense of humour that emerges from a consciousness of decline, ruin, and inevitable disappearance or death.
Deep Purple is a response in wood, at two-thirds of the initial size, to Richard Serra’s famous Tilted Arc (1981), which could be “accessorized” in order to become adjustable, adaptable and mobile. It is this very notion of in situ, and through it the entire history of contemporary sculpture that is evoked here in order to push against both formal and conceptual limitations. Through the exceptional trajectory of Serra’s work, and the publicity process it has engendered, Tom Burr’s work also articulates problems related to architecture and the public sphere, with questions from politics, sociology, psychology, etc. Its title evokes the celebrated British rock group of the same name, a colour prized by the gay community, a colour that has associations with grief or even the purple curtains of certain short stories in the work of Edgar Allan Poe.
Recurring references to great figures of cultural history in the broadest sense, are a response to Burr’s desire to position himself and his actions as such at the heart of Modernism, generating as many readings as possible in the process.
The title of Tom Burr’s exhibition, Gravity Moves Me, pays homage to Carl Andre, another great figure, along with Richard Serra, of Minimalism. With his works composed of steel plates aligned directly on the ground, Carl Andre has conditioned the relationship of the spectator to the work by demolished several of the principle characteristics of sculpture, including verticality, gesture, the material and the autonomy of the work, and by advancing the idea that the sculpture is the site of the work. The project that Tom Burr has developed at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne undertakes to question and test these ideas.
Similarly, the long ramp extending from the ground floor of the FRAC appears in direct reference to Seedbed, the legendary performance that Vito Acconci produced in 1972 at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, where, lying under a ramp for three weeks, he masturbated 8 hours a day while murmuring fantasies that the visitors inspired in him, and which were re-broadcast on speakers. The artist was at that moment both producer and receiver of the pleasure of the work. Tom Burr’s bare wood ramp becomes the medium of a fractured narration. Just like the series of walls that inhabit and literally cloak the exhibition, it also represents a hybrid form of previous works, including the platforms, the mural pieces entitled “Bulletin Boards”, and the room dividers. Though it shares some formal similarities with the platforms, the ramp also constitutes a pictorial surface that one might more easily imagine hung on a wall. Such arrangements recur throughout the exhibition. The walls here are covered, enveloped, protected, indeed, swathed in heavy fabrics, and seem to practically dance throughout the exhibition spaces. They echo a series of “skirts” revealing the nudity of these spaces, which would otherwise have escaped our attention.
Finally, a series of collages adopts the format of a standard linoleum tile as it’s most often used in kitchens or bathrooms. In this somewhat domesticated and miniaturized version of Carl Andre’s work, the decorative and narrative elements that had been rejected by the defenders of minimalism for their impurity can now flourish. Like all of the elements in this exhibition, the collages constitute fragments between which the links are not entirely evident. It becomes important to move around, to be at a remove, or, conversely, to approach the works more closely in order to examine them. Indeed, different things are revealed according to one's position, without there being any one ideal point of view.
Tom Burr was born in 1963 in New Haven. He lives and works in New York. His most recent exhibitions include solo exhibits at the Museum für Gegenwart-skunst in Basel, the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus und Kunstbau in Munich, the SculptureCenter as well as the Swiss Institute in New York, the Secession in Vienna and the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne. He is represented by Bortolami Gallery, New York; Franco Noero, Turin; Neu, Berlin; Galerie Almine Rech, Paris/Brussels; Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London.
The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne is currently preparing an anthology of Tom Burr’s writings, to be published in 2011.
Supported by Champagne Deutz
anna + peter / swing project 1
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Opening on Thursday, Septembre 30th, 2010.
Private visit for the friends of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne: monday, october 11th at 7 pm
Public visits: every sunday at 4pm
Visit for teachers: wednesday, october 13th at 2:30 pm
Visit for students: wednesday, november 17th at 6:30pm
Under the name of Anna + Peter, German artist Anna Blessmann and legendary British designer Peter Saville present their first exhibition at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
Peter Saville's works and ideas are a key reference point for understanding contemporary culture. Early on, he integrated the Modernist tenet of "education through acquisition". From the late 1970s, his work could be characterized as the quoting visual references from dif-ferent cultural fields, thus creating a mutual enrichment of the visual codes governing them.
As Michael Bracewell suggests, Peter Saville is interested in how design reflects a truth more readily assigned to art. He has been instrumental in repositioning design as a creative space that exists between functionality and non-functionality; as an artistic form free from materialism and consumerism; as "an alibi for broader concerns, which were more re-lated to a philosophy of cultural aesthetics".
In Saville's work, it is in fact the idea that takes precedence over the object. The work developed in recent years with Anna Blessmann has become increasingly removed from the idea of design as "problem solving", and has instead drawn closer to conceptual art, thus leaving aside the creation of forms for the re-arrangement and the reassessment of context and cultural status. While Peter Saville's interest in design always involves the relationship between product and technology, like Richard Hamilton whom he admires, it is the relationships between objects, people and contexts that Anna + Peter first and foremost problematize.
Swing Project 1 represents a unique collaboration between the artist and the designer, appealing simultaneously to the ideas, influences and skills of each. Through this project, Peter Saville, like an analyst and a decoder, proffers his observations on today's society in general, and most notably, his vision of visual culture. Anna Blessmann, on the other hand, brings us all of its physicality, sensitivity and sensuality.
Swing Project 1 begins from the observation that in a world where all ar-tistic disciplines are now so intrinsically linked that they blend together, contemporary art must now be approached as a philosophy of society and no longer in relation to the idea of form. The exhibition of Anna + Peter is conceived as a sort of 'mood board'. It introduces the following proposal: it is through exchange - and not through the object - that it is possible to experience the actual world and imagine other possibilities. Through this exhibition, Anna + Peter develop a sharp critique of postmodernist tactics that have led to the creation of a world wholly dedicated to consumption and communication, wherein the hybridity of forms matches their uselessness. Now, as they rightly remind us, "nothing useless can be truly beautiful".
Anna + Peter met in a gallery in Berlin in 2001 and soon started to col-laborate on works which have been shown in various art institutions and publications. They live and work together in London.
Anna Blessmann, was born in Berlin in 1969, and studied Fine Art at HdK in Berlin from 1989 to 1996. She has been living and working in London since 2002. She has had solo exhibitions at Achim Kubinski Gallery in Berlin and at Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart, and has participated in group shows such as 37 Rooms, Kunstwerke, Berlin, Die Macht des Alters - Strategien der Meisterschaft et Come in and find out, vol. 2, Podewill, Berlin. Her work Has been featured in various publications and on record covers. She has also collaborated with designers Maurizio Altieri and Bless.
Born in Manchester in 1955, Peter Saville lives and works in London. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975-1978. In 1979, he became a founding partner of the independent record label Factory Records, where he created some of the most influential album covers of all time for Joy Division and New Order. Going on to work extensively in fashion and the cultural sector, his work is credited with significantly affecting the interplay between art and design. His achievements were celebrated in The Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum in London in 2003, an exhibition which then travelled to Tokyo and Manchester, and the Peter Saville Estate at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich in 2005. He is represented by Galerie Neu in Berlin, and the galleries Hotel and Paul Stolper in London.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With support from Champagne Taittinger.
To listen to Swing Soundtrack by Gillian + Stephen, click here
dexter dalwood
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Opening on Thursday, June 10th, 2010.
Public visits: sunday, june 13th, 20th, 27th; july 4th, 11th, 18th, 25th; august 1st, 8th, 15th at 4 pm
Private visit for the friends of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne: monday, june 28th at 7 pm
British artist Dexter Dalwood has recently been shortlisted as one of the four nominees for the prestigious Turner Prize. Over the last decade Dexter Dalwood has been building a strong reputation in Europe and the States. His exhibition at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne is his very first show in France. This selected survey, featuring major paintings and collages made over the last twelve years, will provide an important and timely opportunity to review his work.
Typically, Dalwood's works depict imagined and constructed interiors or land-scapes, usually devoid of figures, that act as memorials or descriptions of vari-ous historic people, places or moments. They draw on an idea of 'History Painting' as a genre and, like their illustrious antecedents, the quotations, allu-sions and references can be elusive and highly codified at first. But, like the grand eighteenth and nineteenth century works they allude to, the canvases have an immediacy, and power as paintings first and foremost. They range in subject from major political events like Ceaucescu’s Execution (2002), The Birth of the UN (2003) or Yalta (2006) to imagined places that are marked by some traumatic history or event, or which have simply become lodged in our collective cultural unconscious; these include Sharon Tate's House (1998), Neverland (1999), Greenham Common (2008) and Camp David (1999).
Other works are presented as 'portraits' of famous or infamous writers, artists and political figures like William Burroughs (2005), Diana Vreeland (2003), Truman Capote (2004) and Hunter S. Thompson (2009). These people populate our shared cultural memory, and for one reason or another seem to continue to exert a fascination or influence through both their work and their lives. Once again, these 'portraits' are produced by Dalwood through the constructed 'scenes' or 'sets' that he creates.
Almost all of Dalwood's paintings initially start out as small collages - composi-tions he assembles by literally cutting and pasting from the pages of magazines and art history. In the subsequent large-scale canvases the abrupt disjunctures and sharp, clinical edges, are faithfully reproduced, preserving the slightly unnerving, almost jarring quality at a sometimes exhilarating and monumental scale.
The way that Dalwood constructs his pictures, referencing and juxtaposing both image and content, is highly sophisticated. He weaves together personal, social and political histories with art history, popular culture and biography to produce provocative and complex new constellations of meaning. Dalwood's post-modern, post-pop 'history paintings' display a smart and seductive lightness of touch; an accessibility and wit offered through the shared experience of the collective political and cultural histories they invoke.Born in Bristol in 1960, Dexter Dalwood lives and works in London, UK. He studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, and then at the Royal College of Art in London.
Dexter Dalwood’s work has been presented in major exhibitions such as Die Young, Stay Pretty at the ICA in London in 1998 and Neurotic Realism: Part Two at the Saatchi Gallery in 1999. His work has also been shown at numerous venues, amongst which the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Whitney Museum in New York. He has also participated in the 2002 Sydney Biennial and the 2003 Tate Triennial in London. He is represented by Gagosian Gallery (Athens/Beverly Hills/London/New York/Roma) and Alan Cristea Gallery (London).
Organised by Tate St Ives in association with the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne and CAC Málaga, where it will be presented from September 11th, 2010 to No-vember 28th, 2010.
A full colour monographic publication, co-edited by FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Tate St Ives and CAC Málaga, published by JRP Ringier and Tate Publishing, will accompany the exhibition.
ISBN 978-3-03764-126-2. Price: 40 €.
With Support from Champagne Taittinger
latifa echakhch / le rappel des oiseaux
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Opening on Thursday, April 1st, 2010.
Conference, Latifa Echakhch: thursday, april 8th at 6:00 pm, médiathèque Jean Falala
Public visits: sunday, april 11th, 18th, 25th, and may 2nd, 9th, 16th, 23rd at 4 pm
Visit for teachers: wednesday, april 21st at 2:30 pm
Visit for students: thursday, april 29th at 6:30pm
Private visit for the friends of frac champagne-ardenne: Monday, May 10th at 7 pm
“Nuit des musées” visit: saturday, may 15th, from 8 pm to midnight
The works of Latifa Echakhch are a proof that art can be instrumental to exchange and social engagement without necessarily being patronizing or exploitative. While her sculptures are elegant and delicate, the visitor must nevertheless not be deceived by this sensibility when Echakhch examines subjects like culture, geography, and personal and collective histories. She explores these systems through mundane objects, images and ordinary situations, repositioning them in a social and political debate. Her work is not immediately comprehensible, but becomes clear to those who decide to explore it. Even so, the fact of looking at them more profoundly ultimately calls into question the certainties that they seemed to initially promise.
The visual and conceptual power of her combination of Minimalism and Romanticism is potent but misleading. What emerges is a fundamental belief in the dignity of the subjects and what art can bring in terms of reflection, even in its most critical form. Objects that begin as being banal, whether cubes of sugar, fragmented carpets, or broken tea glasses, then become messengers of feeling such as melancholy and anger, and offer a silent point of view on the failure of utopias.
The exhibition, Le rappel des oiseaux, which is presented at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, is principally composed of new works, though a number of older works have been included, which are sometimes shown for the first time. The confrontation allows for a veritable exhibit narrative, in which each work draws inspiration from the preceding one and re-sponds to the next. The narrative emerges as visitors progress through the exhibition space, encountering a multitude of possibilities, according to their own personal references and lived experience.
Some of the works exude a deafening violence. They operate somewhere in between play and punishment, leaving the viewer in an ambivalent position, at once voyeuristic and somewhat ill at ease. In Dérobadimage, for instance, shot in 1999 in the Bois de Vincennes, the camera acts like a gun, while the image itself trembles as though being tracked by a predator. Similarly in Stoning (2010), there is an installation of a constellation of rocks in the main exhibition space of the Frac. It evokes both Jimmie Durham’s Stoning the Refrigerator (1996) and Land Art’s work of the ‘70s, while also resonating intensely with contemporary events. Skin (2010) is a nod to the famous “Skins Party” phenomenon of recent years in the adolescent world, in which young people dress up and get drunk in a regressive, no-limits atmosphere.
Untitled (Sepia) (2009) and Danse macabre (2010) offer moments of pause in the exhibition. They are more poetic and allusive propositions, and could even be qualified as contemporary still-lifes. Seuils (2004) is a very minimalistic intervention that modifies our perception of the exhibition space and allows us to understand it in a totally new way.
The installation Le thé de Saïd (2010) is exhibited on both levels of the Frac. It echoes the gesture of Saïd, Latifa Echakhch’s uncle, who used to place a little teapot under the drainpipe of the house in Khuribga, Morocco, where he lived and worked as a geologist. Once the teapot was full, he could then prepare his ‘special tea’. Echakhch, fascinated by this personal tradition, wanted to show a drainpipe capable of receiving rainwater and letting it accumulate in a small teapot. The length of the pipe, and the means used for creating the installation, intrigue by virtue of the size and delicateness of the teapot. It is this very ‘disproportion’ that lends the installation its poetry.
Finally, the benches in the courtyard of the Frac have been brought directly over from Kassel (Germany). They are a reminder of German Romanticism. Less spectacular than the incomparable panorama and perspective of the 18th century Wilhelmshöhe castle that overlooks Kassel, the Kasseler Parkbänke (2009) nevertheless offers an unprecedented take on Tom Burr’s Deep Purple, which is already exhibited in the courtyard of the Frac since 2008. Indeed, Latifa Echakhch considers it a full-fledged landscape in its own right.
Latifa Echakhch was born in 1974 in El Khnansa (Morocco). She lives and works in Paris and Martigny (Switzerland). She has had numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad (Magasin, Grenoble; Tate Modern, London; Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; Kunstverein, Bielefeld; Swiss Institute, New York), and her work also been shown in group exhibitions at the Sculpture Center in New York, the CAC in Vilnius, the Kunsthalle in Basel and the Kunsthaus in Zurich. She has also participated in Manifesta 7, the European Biennial of Contemporary Art in Bolzano in 2008 and the Lyon Biennial in 2009. Latifa Echakhch is represented by Kamel Mennour in Paris, Galleria Francesca Kaufmann in Milan, and Dvir Gallery in Tel Aviv.
Exhibition realized in collaboration with GAMeC - Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo (Italy) where it will be presented from October 2010.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, founded in 1772
Acknowledgements: Serge Pugeault, Ludivine Esposito, City of Reims, Marie-Sophie Eiché, Dean Inkster, Anne-Bénédicte Quilici, Sabina Belli.
lili reynaud-dewar / antiteater
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Opening Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Private visit for the friends of FRAC Champagne-Ardenne: Monday, January 25th at 7:30 pm
Visits for the general public: Sunday, January 18th, February 14th, and March 14th at 4pm
Visit for students: Thursday, January 28th at 6:30pm
Visit for teachers: Wednesday, February 3rd at 2:30 pm
Lili Reynaud Dewar explores the possibilities of “resistance” linked to eccentricity, this manner of thinking or speaking that is at a remove from commonplace norms. Half way between authenticity and simulation, she plays on the outer precipices of artifice, symbolism, and theatricality. Her performances are extravagant and have been precisely documented. They deal with themes such as the history of shorthand writers of the 20th century (The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of European Shorthand Typists, 2009), the technological premices of cinema (Black Mariah, 2009), the vision of Egypt in Afrocentrism (En Réalité, le sphinx est-il une annexe du monument ou le monument une annexe du sphinx?, 2008), the history of brown slaves (The Center and the Eyes and Queen Mother Nanny of the Mountains, 2006), the life and work of Italian designer Ettore Sottsass (In Every Room There Is the Ghost of Sex, 2008). Though multiple historical references constantly feed into her work, she never-theless uses fiction and myths as veritable critical tools.
Taking antiteater for a title, Lili Reynaud Dewar’s exhibition at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne is inspired by the unique functioning of the eponymous teater company created by Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the end of the 60’s. No role, apart from that of the director, was definitively assigned to the actors or to the technical crew, thus ensuring that no one’s status was securely established. By using this as the title of her exhibition, Reynaud Dewar calls into question the dynamics of power and authority emerging within the group of performers, with whom she has worked for several years. With them, she has created ‘finite happenings’, according to Marguerite Duras’ expression, in which she dramatically constrains the body, its actions, and its relationship to space, through sculpture. The title also recalls the origin of the exhibition, namely, a performance that took place last December 18th in a theatre in Reims, in which she gave a lecture on her work while excerpts of her previous performances were simultaneously performed onstage.
According to this same principle of “mise en abyme,” Dewar invites us to participate in a kind of play within a play, a technique made famous in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play is precisely the one that profoundly intrigued Jorge Luis Borges, who notoriously developed a phobia of mirrors. The works shown on the ground floor of the Frac Champagne–Ardenne are placed in such a way as to create a play on mirrors. Lili Reynaud Dewar positions us at once as spectator and spectacle, suggesting that we are all actors in what no longer seems to be a fiction, but rather an ambitious and possible scenario.
Through this same re-staging and re-contextualisation of existing performances and sculptures within new works, Lili Reynaud Dewar seeks to bring out the continuity within her work. In one of the first-floor rooms is an ensemble of sculptures presented onstage at the Comédie de Reims theatre during her performance on December 18th, 2009: LOVE = U.F.O, Black Mariah and The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of European Shorthand Typists are displayed as much as autonomous sculptures as proofs. This being said, she examines the question of documentation and traces, seeking to create an unprecedented, yet ambiguous format in which the film of the performance becomes the primary interest of the performance itself. She plays derisively upon the omnipresence of the artist (broadcasting her own voice into space, imposing projection reflected in an enormous mirror...), thus literally surrounding the visitor, even though this might create a certain impression of claustrophobia.
On the ground floor is also the third part of a series of works inaugurated last August at Mary Mary in Glasgow, which was extended during an exhibition at the Barriera Foundation in Turin in November. Beginning with the question of work and genre, but also the notion of transmission, The Power Structures, Rituals & Sexuality of European Shorthand Typists, stages the shorthand secretaries, practicing their now obsolete profession as though it were a ritual. In an new video, specially produced for the exhibition, Lili Reynaud Dewar isolates the hands and legs of the per-formers, accentuating the idea of ‘amenuensis,’ a Latin term for the slave entrusted with transcribing his master’s thoughts.
Lili Raynaud-Dewar was born in La Rochelle in 1975. She lives and works in Paris. She is an artist as well as an art critic. She also teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, and co-edits Pétunia, a journal of feminist contemporary art, the first issue of which was published in June, 2009. Her work has been exhibited most notably at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the SBC Gallery in Montreal, the Fondazione Barriera in Turin, the Printemps de septembre in Toulouse, the Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea in Syracusa, the 5th Berlin Biennial, and the 9th Lyon Biennial. Lili Raynaud Dewar is represented by Kamel Mennour in Paris, and Mary Mary in Glasgow.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With the support of Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, founded in 1772
marine hugonnier / part 3
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Opening Thursday 26 november 2009
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Public Visits: Sunday, 6 December 2009 and Sunday, 3 January 2010 at 4 P.M.
Private Visit for les amis du frac champagne-ardenne: Monday, 30 November at 7 P.M.
Visit for Teachers: Wednesday, 2 December at 2:30 P.M.
Special Student Museum Night : Wednesday, 2 December from 8 P.M. to Midnight
Reims Scènes d’Europe visit: Thursday, 17 December at 7 P.M.
Beginning with the idea that all that we visually perceive depends on the perspective from which we view it, Marine Hugonnier works on what she herself describes as a visual policy. She explores different modes of film, vacillating between documentary and fiction, and deals with the questions emerging from the production of images, and of moving images in particular. The films she produces are often presented as installations evolving in relation to their exhibition site. Her work is broadly shown in film festivals, and reaches beyond the strict framework of contemporary art, touching on visual anthropology.
Marine Hugonnier has chosen to name this exhibition Part 3, because it is the third part in the Three Continents Trilogy, which she began exhibiting in 2003, and has never been shown in France. The exhibit consists of a film, two photographic series, as well as ‘books.’ The latter reveals her taste for exploring the border between history and geography, as well as the manner in which a landscape determines the history of a place, and vice versa.
Travelling Amazonia (2006) is the last work in this trilogy through which Marine Hugonnier explores different modes of filmmaking. This film, which was shot in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, deals with the abbreviated construction of the Trans-Amazonian Highway. The colossal project was developed in the 1970s by the Brazilian military dictatorship then in power. It aimed to connect the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to span a distance of more than 9000 kilometers. Hugonnier and her team were to build a wagon with rails using the same materials as those for the highway (namely, rubber, wood, and metal), and to set them up on the road for a travelling shot. The plan recalls the linearity of the Trans-Amazonian, and evokes both the ideals of the pioneers, as well as the colonialists’ designs linked to the project. She thus questions Western systems of representation.
Hugonnier’s installation Wednesday (Monte Pascoal, Brazil) and Thursday (Monte Pascoal, Brazil) is composed of two photographs shot in 2005. For these, she went to exactly the same spot as the Portuguese explorer Pedro Alvares Cabral, when he landed on 22 April, 1500. Though he’d been looking for the route to India, a hurricane pushed him toward the coastline, enabling him one Wednesday evening to spot Monte Pascoal in the darkness and thus discover Brazil. He nevertheless had to wait until the first light of day before being able to land.
Beach of the New World (Monte Pascoal National Park, Brazil), is a photograph dating from 2005, and represents the beach where Cabral and his crew landed on the morning of Thursday, 23 April 1500. By showing us the vision of the Portuguese explorer, Hugonnier touches on those few hours in History when the ideas, beliefs and imagination associated with the New World took hold of the Western Psyche.
Geographic Works accompany the films composing the Three Continents Trilogy: Ariana (2003), The Last Tour (2004) and Travelling Amazonia (2006). Marine Hugonnier has brought together these images from before, during and after the creation of these projects. Their accordion format allows one to rework the content in a thousand different ways.
Marine Hugonnier was born in 1969 in Paris. She lives and works in Paris and London. She recently had solo exhibitions at the Villa Romana in Florence, the Kunstverein in Brauschweig, the Konsthall in Malmö, the MAMCO in Geneva, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin as well as the Kunsthalle in Bern. She has also participated in group exhibitions, notably at the MACBA in Barcelona, and at the Kunsthaus in Graz. In 2007, her work was presented in the 52nd Venice Biennial. That same year, she won the prestigious London Film Award.
On the occasion of this exhibition, a monographic catalogue will be co-published with the Malmö Konsthall, the Kunstverein Braunschweig and the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, and JRPlRingier.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, founded in 1772
boris achour / conatus: la rose est sans pourquoi
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Opening on Thursday, September 10th, 2009
Lecture, Boris Achour: thursday, octobre 8th at 6 pm, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne
« Journées du Patrimoine » public visits: saturday, september 19th and sunday, september 20th from 2 to 7 pm
Visit for teachers: wednesday, september 23rd at 2:30 pm
Private visit for the friends of frac champagne-ardenne, with artist present: thursday, october 8th at 7:30 pm
« Collections d'automne »: saturday, october 17th, sunday, october 18th at 4pm
Visit for students: thursday, october 29th at 6:30pm
Boris Achour’s work constitutes an open, combinatorial system, one that is in perpetual evolution based on the affirmation of form, the joy procured from creating, and the necessity of making connections. It mixes heterogeneous elements without hierarchy from highly varied cultural and formal fields. Since 2006, Achour’s work has been shaped by Spinoza’s concept of “conatus”, namely, man’s desire as a driving force, his will to persevere in his own being and increase his power to act. His exhibitions can be seen as episodes in a series in which the characters are works. These in turn form the elements of a constellation in constant expansion.
The point of departure for this Boris Achour exhibition is a short poem by Johann Scheffler, the 17th century German theologian and mystical poet better known as Angelus Silesius: “The rose is without why, it blooms because it blooms, It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen”. From this quatrain, the artist draws a multitude of questions, notably with regard to the work’s autonomy, sovereignty, and power of af-firmation, and the nature of its relationship to the spectator. These have nourished the conception of the works presented here, but they could also just as easily be so many points of entry into the exhibition. Boris Achour’s work fully occupies all of the FRAC, and he is true to the plurality that characterizes his work. He presents here an ensemble of new works that are at once heterogeneous and coherent.
Boris Achour was born in Marseille in 1966. He lives and works in Paris. Most notably, his work was shown in “The Force of Art” at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2006 and in 2009, at “September Spring” in Toulouse in 2009, the Biennial of Contemporary Art in Rennes in 2008, as well as in important international institutions such as S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the Montehermoso Cultural Center in Vitoria, and the Contemporary Art Museum of Bucharest. Boris Achour was awarded the Ricard Foundation Prize in 2002. He is represented by the Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With Support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Maison fondée en 1772
cyprien gaillard
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Opening Thursday, May 14th, 2009
Cyprien Gaillard’s photographic, film, pictorial and graphic work stems from the observation of rural and urban landscapes, and the exploration of the relationship between nature and architecture. Gaillard has developed a most personal form of Land Art. Indeed, his approach, vacillating between Romanticism and vandalism, involves investigating the traces man has left behind in nature. His modus operandi and the works he creates are characterized by a transgression of legal and moral rules. At the same time, he has made numerous references to the ideas of American artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, and especially his notion of entropy. Like Smithson, Gaillard first worked on suburban sites before becoming interested in classic, even idyllic, country landscapes.
Cyprien Gaillard travels over housing estates and semi-industrial zones on the lookout for modern buildings on the brink of destruction. One of his projects is in fact to bring these sites together one day in the same place, in order to create a park of ruins. Since 2006, Gaillard has been producing Geographical Analogies, series of Polaroids addressing the question of entropic landscapes by illustrating places affected by the process of erosion and decomposition. Pinned like butterflies under a glass, the Polaroids are minutely organized in series of nines, according to a principle of visual correspondence between the elements represented. Thus the artist brings out correspondences between apparently separate cultural fields, such as art history, geopolitics, youth culture, geology...
For his solo exhibition at the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Cyprien Gaillard gathers together the entire series of the Geographical Analogies, displayed as a monumental installation. At the same time, new works are on exhibit that have been conceived of by the artist especially for this exhibition, amongst which is a large wall painting notably inspired by a representation of the labyrinth of Rheims’ famous cathedral.
Cyprien Gaillard was born in Paris in 1980. He lives and works in Paris and Berlin. He recently had solo exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Stroom in The Hague, SMS Contemporanea in Siena. He participated in the 5th Berlin Biennial, the 9th Lyon Biennial, and the 1st Athens Biennial. He was awarded the Audi Talent Award in 2007, and the David Academy Award in 2008. He is represented by Cosmic Galerie in Paris, and Laura Bartlett Gallery in London.
Curator: Florence Derieux
With Support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, founded in 1772
Acknowledgements: Nicolas Martin, Claudia Cargnel, Frédéric Bugada, Cosmic Galerie, Stéphane Kropf, Gilles Gavillet, Giovanni Giuliani, Luca Liberali, Pierpaolo Barzan, Rita Huys, Rein Wolfs, Sabina Belli, Anne Cabin Saint-Marcel, Geneviève Jamin-Dejoie, Fabienne Moreau-Huttaux.
laurent montaron / ayylu
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Dix ans après sa toute première exposition personnelle, présentée au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne en 1999, Laurent Montaron investit à nouveau ses espaces d’exposition pour y présenter un ambitieux projet monographique réunissant une série d’œuvres inédites, réalisées spécialement à cette occasion.
Le titre de l’exposition, AYYLU, fait référence au code morse, qui permet de transmettre un texte grâce à une série d’impulsions courtes et longues. Cet alphabet attribue à chaque lettre, chiffre et signe de ponctuation une combinaison unique de signaux, mécaniques ou visuels, plus ou moins brefs. Parallèlement au code morse, des codes commerciaux ont été inventés pour la télégraphie, tels AYYLU qui signifie « Not clearly coded, repeat more clearly » (pas assez clair, veuillez répéter plus clairement). Chacune des œuvres présentées dans cette exposition décline la problématique du langage et de sa transmission via différentes tech-nologies, qu’elles soient ancestrales ou au contraire contemporaines.
Balbvtio, film co-produit avec l’Institut d’art contemporain de Villeurbanne*, est une œuvre inédite composée de deux films identiques projetés côte à côte. Elle constitue une narration cinématographique, mais également une mise à distance de la rhétorique même du cinéma. Générés par deux prises de vues différentes, ces films placent le contenu de l’histoire sur un autre plan que celui de la matérialité de l’image. L’histoire évoque de manière allégorique le message et le lien que tisse la parole avec l’Esperanto. Conçue à la fin du 19e siècle par le docteur Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, l’Esperanto est une langue dont la syntaxe est basée sur des langues déjà existantes, dans le but de faciliter la communication et la compréhension entre des individus de diverses nationalités.
L’intérêt de Laurent Montaron pour le cinéma apparaît ainsi en filigrane dans sa pratique. Depuis la série Sous un nouveau jour, qu’il avait pré-sentée au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne à l’automne 1999, cet intérêt s’est constamment développé au travers d’images, d’objets et de dispositifs, à l’instar du film 16mm Key, réalisé spécialement pour cette exposition.
Le travail de Laurent Montaron montre, tout en les interrogeant, les habitudes et les mécanismes qui régissent notre regard. Il souligne ainsi la manière dont les outils façonnent nos représentations et indexent de façon tangible la manière dont se construit la pensée. Dans cette perspective, le réel voisine l’imaginaire.
Le film Balbvtio, oeuvre coproduite par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne et l'Institut d'art contemporain de Villeurbanne, y est également présenté du 28 janvier au 15 mars 2009. http://www.i-art-c.org
Commissaire de l'exposition: Florence Derieux
la fête est permanente / the eternal network
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Works by Saâdane Afif, John Bock, Martin Boyce, Chris Burden, Tom Burr, Stéphane Calais, Claude Closky, Erik Dietman, Willie Doherty, Jimmie Durham, Eric Duyckaerts, Robert Filliou, Ceal Floyer, Michel François, Aurélien Froment, Jef Geys, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Raymond Hains, Richard Hamilton & Dieter Roth, Lothar Hempel, Pierre Huyghe, Matthew Day Jackson, Alain Jacquet, Pierre Joseph, Michel Journiac, Robert Malaval, Christian Marclay, Laurent Montaron, Matt Mullican, Philippe Ramette, Joe Scanlan, Ger Van Elk, Julia Wachtel, Jeff Wall, James Welling, Franz West.
Curator: Florence Derieux
ann craven / shadow's moon
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From June 27th until September 21st 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne will present the first solo show in Europe dedicated to American artist Ann Craven.
Ann Craven’s work can be situated alongside the thinking of a number of other American artists today, such as Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, or Josh Smith. They work with the potential of surface, and incorporate not only the saturation of the contemporary world with images, but also the mistakes or accidents that infinite production unavoidably generates. Her work derives from a deep and spiritual interiority; it is a means of attuning her thinking, her body, her breathing, even, to pictorial practice with almost obsessive rigor. Thus, while her work itself is formally distinctive, Ann Craven acknowledges the influence of artists such as Vija Celmins, Allan McCollum, and even Agnes Martin, whose standards for precision in artistic practice are inseparable from the physiological rhythms of their lives.
Ann Craven is, fundamentally, a painter. She paints the moon. Sometimes she paints birds, flowers, deer, or color stripes. She has painted 400 moons, not as ephemeris, but rather as though the pale light of this eternal face were calling out to missing or faraway loved ones in a kind of nocturnal reverie in which the brush were the master of ceremonies. The works are silently flush with this affective power. She then reproduces these same moons, twisting the knife into Painting’s persistent claim to always be able to underscore its own originality, to flaunt its singularity.
She paints antiquated subjects, for she knows the symbolic power of the images accompanying us, even the most insignificant ones; those empty of content that our grandmothers would keep for no veritable reason, or the gold stars that a schoolgirl or boy pins up in their room with such pride. Her birds and flowers series endlessly interpret the essential painterly relationship between background and form, and the vibration of dazzling colors as so many signs of the times. When a color is applied, Ann Craven touches her brush onto another canvas, brushing out and exhausting the color in a line. In doing so, the functions of brush and palette are transposed, to the point that the palette itself also becomes a canvas. Nothing is lost, therefore; everything is "painting", and all painting is equal in her eyes, whether copy or original, background color, abstract band, or bird on a branch.
This exhibition of Ann Craven’s work follows upon her artist residency at the Chaudronnerie at the Lycée Val de Murigny, as part of a collaborative project that the FRAC has created with this institution. A retrospective publication about her work is being prepared in association with JRP|Ringier.
aurélien froment / en abrégé
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Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne présente En abrégé, une exposition d’Aurélien Froment (né en 1976 à Angers). Cet artiste développe, à partir d’une pratique protéiforme (photographie, vidéo, installation, sculpture, édition…), une œuvre homogène au sein de laquelle différents éléments structurent une réflexion sur l’image et la façon dont celle-ci se constitue à la fois dans le temps et dans l’espace. À l’instar du prestidigitateur qui apparaît dans la vidéo Théâtre de poche (2007), Aurélien Froment crée un univers très personnel dans lequel ses œuvres répondent les unes aux autres et placent le visiteur dans une sorte de jeu de l’esprit, à la manière d’un film à épisodes où « il est toujours possible de prendre une pièce comme point de départ et de la relier par différents degrés de séparation à une autre pièce ».
L’exposition En abrégé est conçue comme un espace où les technologies de l’image – et les gestes qui en découlent – sont mises en perspective, se superposent, se distinguent, s’influencent et se combinent.
Préfigurant l’illusion cinématographique et exploitant par-là même la théorie de la persistance rétinienne, le thaumatrope (du grec thauma, prodige, et tropion, tourner) est un jouet optique inventé vers 1825 qui permet à deux images imprimées recto/verso de se superposer et se mélanger. Le carton d’invitation de l’exposition illustre cette idée selon laquelle deux images peuvent en créer une troisième.
Un entretien est diffusé en fond sonore de l’exposition : on y entend le magicien Benoit Rosemont parler de l’un de ses numéros de « mémoire prodigieuse ». Il explique sa technique de mémorisation, qui repose sur l’association de chiffres à des images et de ces images à d’autres images. Grâce à une table de rappel, Benoît Rosemont forme des images mentales qui lui permettent de mémoriser instantanément tout type d’information.
En écho, Who Here Listens to BBC News On Friday Night ? (2008) emprunte son titre à une phrase mnémotechnique utilisée pour se souvenir des deux premières lignes de la table de classification des éléments établie par le chimiste russe Mendeleïev (Hydrogène, Helium, Lithium, Béryllium, Bore, Carbone, Nitrogène, Oxygène, Fluorine, Néon). Composée de 52 paires de cartes imprimées, cette installation propose au visiteur un jeu de Memory : les images disposées sur la table représentent certains des éléments présents dans l’exposition sous la forme d’images-clés. Imprimées en double, ces images peuvent être retournées deux par deux afin de reconstituer des paires. Reposant sur l’identification des motifs représentés et la mémorisation de l’emplacement des cartes retournées, cette manipulation n’obéit à aucun mode d’emploi : la grille qui figure sur le plateau de verre est une promesse d’autres possibilités quant à l’usage des images une fois toutes retournées.
Enfin, avec Balance des blancs (2007), Aurélien Froment utilise un projecteur 35mm/16mm dont le faisceau lumineux est comme « annulé » par l’éclairage de la salle d’exposition. Le dispositif de projection cinématographique devenant ainsi un modèle d’exposition, l’artiste suggère que c’est ici l’exposition qui fait film.
Chacune des œuvres présentées au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne contient un ou plusieurs éléments constitutifs des autres, comme un jeu de poupées russes un peu particulier : un jeu dans lequel le plus petit des éléments pourrait contenir l’ensemble, un ensemble d’abrégés.
gedi sibony / if surrounded by foxes
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From April 25th until June 8th 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first solo show in a French institution of New York based artist Gedi Sibony. Sibony’s sculptures and installations feature a filigree aesthetics that is characterized by a sensual use of materials and forms. Cardboard, wood, carpets, plastic sheaths or latex paint are by multi-levelled shifting processes embedded into the exhibition room’s architectural situation. The interaction of these materials without qualities results in fragile arrangements featuring very much its particular tactile properties.
The universe proposed by Gedi Sibony takes into account hidden dimensions of space: not only measurement, proportions, style, history, but also imperfections, interstices, lights – both those which cross and those which enliven the place – resonance, life of the institution, administration, visitors, the cleaning lady, the guard’s dog, i.e. everything possible.
Sibony’s “spatial collages” oscillate between object-like appearance and installative ensembles. One can well describe them as low-key art that culminates however also in spectacular clous. As a result of the securing of evidence, the minimal dislocations and the sensorial moments, a novel constitution of space is articulated. Yet, Sibony avoids to predetermine any definite statements or to offer a simplified reading of the exposed.
Gedi Sibony’s artistic posture is very unique. He goes constantly from a very serious attitude to a great lightness, from a fundamental research to an amused nonchalance, from inspiration by the Tales of Tchouang-tseu to Buster Keaton’s sense of humor. His creative practice is basically not-discriminating, close to a principle of equality of values. He can consider another order of the world, in which the unforeseen sudden appearance would not make any more chaos, like in a wild garden.
Born in 1973 in New York where he lives and works, Gedi Sibony is the 2006 Metcalf Award winner. Amongst other, his work has been shown at Midway contemporary art center in Mineapolis in 2006, and New York’s New Museum reopening in 2007. He had a solo show at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen in Switzerland in the Fall of 2007.
Following Gedi Sibony’s exhibition in Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, a catalogue will be published in partnership with the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
melvin moti / the prisoner's cinema
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From May 7th until June 15th, 2008, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first exhibition in France of the Dutch artist Melvin Moti, whose practice concerns mainly the fields of cinema and video. Each of his films is the result of a slow and meticulous documentary research on which the artist confers a poetic and personal dimension.
Through a study of the mechanisms of history, Melvin Moti proposes a personal re-reading of historical facts where sound and oral character play a prevalent part. If the images generally concern the unspectacular, soundtrack is always compelling, which allows new perspective of it.
Thus, in Stories from Surinam, 2002, the artist did research on his roots through the history of 34.000 Indian labourers who, between 1873 and 1916, left India to Surinam to work on Dutch plantations. By intertwining various personal anecdotes that he recorded here and there, the structure of the film leaves a space of expression to oral transmission, to which historical and social perspectives given in books on this subject leave little chances of survival.
Each of Melvin Moti’s projects are stamped with a rigour which reveals a quality at the limits of abstraction. The artist grew up in the 1980s and 1990s – decades of superabundance, speed and multiplicity of visual signs – which refined his sensibility with images. He declares that “profusion mostly provokes a feeling of boredom” within him and that he has “always been captivated by simplicity and by the abstraction associated with simplicity.” This discharged from extra elements quality is precisely exemplified in No Show, a film made in 2004 in which a strange guided tour of The Hermitage museum is proposed. In 1941, The Hermitage’s collection was hastily taken away. As the frames were left hanging on the walls, the rest of the museum was empty. Pavel Gubchevsky guided a group of soldiers through the museum in 1943, along the empty frames. This film is based on that excursion and mixes real facts and imagination.
At the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Melvin Moti will present a new 35mm work entitled The Prisoner’s Cinema. The Prisoner’s Cinema is a phenomenon reported by prisoners confined to dark cells for long periods of time. It has also been reported by truck drivers and pilots, as a result having a neutral view, without visual information, for an extensive time. The “cinema” consists of lights, appearing out of the darkness in various colours and geometrical shapes. They are projected, as it were in front of the subject who becomes the director of his or her own cinema.
The Prisoner’s cinema combines abstract images of light shining through a church window with the account of a scientist describing her vision after being deprived from sensory information for days.Melvin Moti’s study on this physiological effect took about one year and resulted in a film dealing with these projected light forms in relation to formalism, memory and history.
le dernier qui parle
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From January 18th until March 30th, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents Le dernier qui parle (The last Who Speaks), an exhibition dedicated to the notions of appropriation, quotation, of borders between original feature and plagiary, of acknowledgement, of hybridity of genre and disciplines, all of this against the growing over-legislation of author’s rights.
Thanks to laws supposed to protect the artists, creation has become the simplest way of property access. And yet creators continue to live in destitution, even though modes of authors' rights allocation spread in domains sometimes very distant from artistic creation. The lawmaker struggles to realize what comes under a given artistic conscience, or from the pertinence of a text, of a picture, of an object which asserts its singularity in borrowing the forms from one another. This exhibition tries to avoid moroseness and doom watch which encircle these questions. Three independent curators – Jean-Marc Chapoulie, Pierre Leguillon and Daniel McClean – have been invited to confront their views and horizons on that topic, in creating an area of thought, reaction and creation which Le dernier qui parle is the final point. The aim is not to draw up an assessment of numerous drifts of the copyright, but to invent new areas of observation of contemporary world and thought.
For many years – like a stallholder projectionist in his Alchimicinéma screenings, or like in TDF06 in which cycling images are simply removed from the Tour de France TV reports – Jean-Marc Chapoulie has carried a transversal and bright look on the moving image. He considers exhibition, and more generally speaking art institution, as a thief market – a place of concealment where the artwork, in essence, establishes itself as a suspicious object. According to him, the notion of originality is simply no longer topical.
Artist and art critic, for many years, Pierre Leguillon has dwelt a space which he purposely whishes intermediate, and therefore has become the troublemaker regarding those who want art to be over-professionalized. Here, he moves his reflection on the basis of original pictures which inspired his famous Diaporamas he has been presenting for more than ten years, and for which look and association of ideas are considered to be fully acts. Understandably, Pierre Leguillon thinks that the best answer to authoritarian claim is to apply its logic up to confusion and salutary loss.
Both specialized lawyer in author’s rights and independent curator, Daniel McClean is the curator and editor of a project entitled Dear Images: art, copyright and culture, presented at London’s ICA in 2002. Here, his idea concerns conceptual proposals of artists linked to a yet to be written history of dating, which thus avoids the notions of object, space and time of art; as if art had to free itself from material pressures where this Last who speaks authoritarian affirmation lays.
what you see is what you guess
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Works by Christian Andersson, Attila Csörgö, Ceal Floyer, Christoph Keller, Steven Pippin, Julius Popp, Arcangelo Sassolino.
Until where perception can inform consciousness? On the other hand, at which time does knowledge correct perception? From September 14th until November 18th, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne will present an exhibition curated by Italian art critic Alessandra Pace.
What You See Is What You Guess/WYSIWYG makes echo with the acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”, often used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. Indeed, we interpret appearances according to their causal relations and are brought to make reasonable and fast predictions on becoming to specific actions. Waiting for effects and consequences fills the intervals of perception, so we take for reality objects or events created of any part in our mind, even before they shape true forms.
But as art is tricky, it exploits our credulity, walks us and dismounts logics of thought of the similarities. The What You See Is What you Guess/WYSIWYG exhibition is the occasion to discover artists very little seen in France whose attention with scientific research crosses a questioning on the representation and perception. This exhibition invites the visitor to enter not only the conscience of work but also its machinery, by crossing the obstacles of perception, of which the greatest is an a priori.
Thus, Arcangelo Sassolino proposes a metallic spider/crab (Untitled, 2006) whose movements and sudden starts are at the infinitesimal border of living and mechanics. Ceal Floyer (Projection, 1997) and Christian Andersson (F for Fake, 2002) bring into play the subterfuges related to luminous projection. Like the workshop of an alchemist, the overlap of forms is materialized in a poetic way by Attila Csörgö in his 1993 sculpture Three Solids; while Julius Popp plays with forms made of non-solid materials, using a technological device that slowly becomes aware of its own body (bit.flow, 2004- 2006). As for Christoph Keller (Rundum Alexanderplatz, 1996) and Steven Pippin (Laundromat-Locomotion [Horse & Rider], 2007), they create works where perception is disturbed by photographic anamorphoses.
What You See Is What You Guess/WYSIWYG makes echo with the acronym for “What You See Is What You Get”, often used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. Indeed, we interpret appearances according to their causal relations and are brought to make reasonable and fast predictions on becoming to specific actions. Waiting for effects and consequences fills the intervals of perception, so we take for reality objects or events created of any part in our mind, even before they shape true forms.
But as art is tricky, it exploits our credulity, walks us and dismounts logics of thought of the similarities. The What You See Is What you Guess/WYSIWYG exhibition is the occasion to discover artists very little seen in France whose attention with scientific research crosses a questioning on the representation and perception. This exhibition invites the visitor to enter not only the conscience of work but also its machinery, by crossing the obstacles of perception, of which the greatest is an a priori.
Thus, Arcangelo Sassolino proposes a metallic spider/crab (Untitled, 2006) whose movements and sudden starts are at the infinitesimal border of living and mechanics. Ceal Floyer (Projection, 1997) and Christian Andersson (F for Fake, 2002) bring into play the subterfuges related to luminous projection. Like the workshop of an alchemist, the overlap of forms is materialized in a poetic way by Attila Csörgö in his 1993 sculpture Three Solids; while Julius Popp plays with forms made of non-solid materials, using a technological device that slowly becomes aware of its own body (bit.flow, 2004- 2006). As for Christoph Keller (Rundum Alexanderplatz, 1996) and Steven Pippin (Laundromat-Locomotion [Horse & Rider], 2007), they create works where perception is disturbed by photographic anamorphoses.
mircea cantor / ciel variable
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From May 4th until July 15th, FRAC Champagne-Ardenne will present the first solo exhibition in France of the Romanian artist, Mircea Cantor. In order to envisage the possibility of the end of the world, the artist has named this exhibition Ciel variable (Changing Skies). The future’s unpredictability suggests at once the Apocalypse and potential renewal. This is reflected in his sculpture/scale model, Monument for the End of the World, in which the bell chimes overhanging the model of a big city can be set off by a possible disaster.
From video and photography to prints and installations, Mircea Cantor’s work unfolds in a diversity of media without repeating itself. Each artwork assumes the aspect of a manifesto; each picture is justified. By proposing a personal response to a reality saturated with sometimes oppressive signs, Mircea Cantor upsets and reverses conventions, like his painted canvas of a nest made of apparently dead twigs, which bud once again. This cycle of disappearance and renewal is constantly brought into play in Cantor’s work, reminding us of our frantic racing against time in contemporary society.
Neither a traditional retrospective, nor a show of only new artworks, this exhibition is a way for the artist to offer a new reading of his art. The works occupy all of the Frac’s galleries, revealing the materialization of Mircea Cantor’s non-linear conception of cosmogony; a universe encompassing all futures, all pasts, all potentialities. Untitled, 2006, for example, shows part of a torn headline of Le Monde, to which the artist added two ‘s’ in red marker. It is a sensitive allegory of the fragility of our convictions when confronted with the infinite plurality of worlds, deepening in turn our uncertainty and anxiety. Very often, as an attentive observer of society and cultures, Mircea Cantor places himself at the crossroads between worlds, allowing for the coming together of differing mentalities. He is preoccupied with the alchemy of ideologies in the infinite movement of thought.
Mircea Cantor gained international attention at the 2003 Venice Biennale, at the 2006 Berlin Biennale, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2006, and at the Yvon Lambert Gallery (Paris and New York). Winner of the 2004 Ricard Prize, he is an outstanding figure among Eastern Europe’s emerging artists. Cantor grew up in Romania during the Communist era, and views the current governments, as well as illusions of Western neo-conservatism, with lucidity and distance. Cantor is also heavily involved in the Romanian artistic scene, and is a co-editor of Version magazine.
Mircea Cantor has been invited by the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne for an artist residency at the Chaudronnerie in the Val-de-Murigny high school in Rheims. During this period, he will produce a 16mm film showing the incandescence, then dissolution, of the shadow of a formless flag of indeterminate origin. The very fact of its being unidentifiable renders it emblematic, on a universal scale, of the end of a regime and the renewal of society.
In conjunction with this exhibition, the first monograph of Mircea Cantor will be published by the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, in partnership with the Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris / New York. Due out in the Fall.
nicolas boulard / le temps qui reste
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Le travail de Nicolas Boulard se déploie sous des formes hétérogènes : clips vidéo, photos numériques, sculptures inspirées de mobiliers, jeux, gonflables... Doublement diplômé en art et en design à l’Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg, Nicolas Boulard a été «résident» du Collège Invisible, réseau d’enseignement artistique sur Internet, créé par Paul Devautour. Il collabore régulièrement avec de grands talents de la musique électronique tels que Console, Joachim Montessuis ou Ikko Yamagochi et réalise des clips qui interrogent chacun à leur façon, la persistance obsédante avec laquelle les signes et les images de communication marquent la conscience.
Nicolas Boulard s’est fait connaître par un travail très singulier sur le vin. Authentique spécialiste, issu lui-même d’une famille du champagne, il réalise des vins et projets vinicoles pour lesquels la générosité, la convivialité, le sens du partage, rencontrent une position critique, parfois provocatrice, mettant en jeu les fragilités et les préjugés de cette industrie. Le H 20 ou H2 O, suivant sa prononciation, est un vin sans raisin, uniquement constitué d’eau et des correcteurs de goût plus ou moins autorisés par la loi. Le Grand Vin de Reims, oeuvre - multiple créée pour l’Association des Amis du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, est le fruit de vendanges sur la totalité des «parcelles» de la ville de Reims : grandes surfaces, épiceries diverses, voire même les vignes décoratives des ronds-points.
Que ce soit pour les films, les objets, les vins, c’est avant tout l’œuvre d’un hacker de la pensée, qui s’infiltre et pénètre les systèmes ou les savoir-faire, en disloque les composantes structurelles pour en proposer des alternatives et d’autres perspectives. L’exposition Le temps qui reste, référence à un texte de Giorgio Agamben qui montre comment une œuvre du passé ne parvient à sa lisibilité qu’à certains moments de l’Histoire, aborde la question de la durée, montre au travers du vin que l’œuvre d’art elle-même est l’objet d’un lent mûrissage, qu’elle fait l’expérience du temps et inscrit ses propres cycles temporels.
En conjonction avec l’exposition, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne et les éditions Analogues, publient un numéro de Semaine sur le travail de Nicolas Boulard, comprenant un texte et un projet original de l’artiste américain Ben Kinmont.
francisco ruiz de infante (avec christian sébille) / tables amplifiées (bestiaire)
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Dans une époque où l’école, les organes de presse, la télévision, la publicité, la politique, prophétisent un monde d’idées simples, univoques que l’on aborderait par des actions déterminées et rationnelles, Francisco Ruiz de Infante nous rappelle très à propos combien la pensée humaine est de nature complexe. Toute formulation d’idées est inévitablement incomplète puisque l’esprit est un terrain meuble sur lequel les certitudes s’enlisent sans cesse sous l’effet de nos contradictions, de l’indicible, de la complexité des langages, de la mémoire et de la représentation.
Depuis quelques temps, Francisco Ruiz de Infante réalise et collectionne des schémas techniques, des notes et diagrammes manuscrits, qu’il qualifie indistinctement de «dessins», des cartographies neuronales qui révèlent combien la force de la pensée est d’être fondamentalement empêtrée. Tables, bureaux, laboratoires, atelier, lieux de projection, tables de dissection, ces «milles-et-un plateaux» sont pour l’artiste autant de résonateurs de l’esprit. Ainsi l’exposition Tables amplifiées (bestiaire) propose-t-elle un singulier inventaire de dispositions mentales. On passe de La table copiste à d’autres, intitulées Mens-moi, Trois trous, Cabinet de dessin, Disque dur, Télépathie, une série d’installations aux développements organiques et réflexifs, avec çà et là des images de larves, de poux et autres scolopendres sectionnés, qui semblent vouloir nous enseigner des alphabets indéchiffrables.
L’exposition Tables amplifiées (bestiaire) vient aussi concrétiser près de quatre années de travail et d’échange entre l’artiste Francisco Ruiz de Infante et le compositeur Christian Sébille. On comprend que ces résonateurs de pensées aient aussi captivé le musicien électro-acoustique, compositeur des Villes imaginées et fondateur de Césaré, Centre national de création musicale à Reims. L’exposition Jeu de cartes (2003) au Centre de création pour l’enfance de Tinqueux, Donala (2005), pièce musicale pour la scène du Grand Théâtre de Reims, La pierre de New-York (symphonie) (2006), concert-performance présenté au Caixa Forum de Barcelone, ou encore la création musicale et plastique composée pour l’abbaye de Clairvaux en septembre de cette année, ont montré dans les diverses formes de leur collaboration une attention mutuelle, la confrontation tenace des exigences, la curiosité et un sens commun du jeu, produit de moments rares et précieux de création. Une publication, en préparation, rendra compte des amplifications de cette véritable rencontre entre les arts visuels et musicaux.
L’exposition Tables amplifiées (bestiaire) a été produite en partenariat avec Césaré, Centre national de création musicale, Reims / Autour de la terre, Auberive / le Centre d’art La Panera, Lleida, Espagne.
La pierre de New-York (symphonie) sera présentée à Reims au Manège / Scène Nationale le vendredi 7 septembre 2007 à 19h00.
L’exposition Tables amplifiées (insectes) au Centre d’art La Panera, Lleida en Espagne, prolongera celle du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, à partir du 20 avril 2007.
françois matton / de pièces en pièces, chroniques sur des oeuvres nomades
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Qui a dit que l’art contemporain n’avait pas de public ? La création de l’Association des Amis du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne en septembre 1996 prouve le contraire. Depuis cette date, les adhérents accompagnent de leur enthousiasme indéfectible les propositions qui sont faites au public, que le FRAC contribue à émouvoir, informer et former dans le champ toujours effervescent de l’art contemporain.
En 2006 l’Association des Amis fête le début d’une nouvelle décennie et initie une année d’Œuvres Nomades. Pour une soirée et entourés du cercle de leurs amis privilégiés, les membres de l’Association qui le souhaitent peuvent ainsi inviter une ou plusieurs œuvres de la collection du FRAC dans le lieu de leur choix : domicile, lieu professionnel, jardin ou autres décors surprenants... Ces moments festifs de rencontres et de découvertes ont alors suscité un dialogue nouveau et libéré autour des œuvres.
François Matton, artiste invité par l’Association, a accompagné cette série de soirées en apportant son point de vue artistique et décalé. Avec l’exposition De pièces en pièces, chroniques sur des Œuvres Nomades, il nous en donne aujourd’hui un compte-rendu personnel et volontairement subjectif. Ses dessins envahissent les murs du FRAC et instaurent un dialogue inédit avec les œuvres de la collection. A travers la fragilité de son trait et de son écriture, une réflexion sur le nomadisme dans l’art se mêle au récit de cette année de rencontres, dérivant du sérieux d’une discussion de passionnés à l’anecdote légère d’une fête entre amis!
Accompagnant François Matton dans cette exposition, les membres de l’Association en produisent la documentation, simple et érudite, témoignage de dix années de pédagogie douce et rigoureuse auprès de néophytes, d’amateurs éclairés et de collectionneurs dont le cercle convivial s’élargit, stimulé par la curiosité vive de chacun. Avec cette exposition l’Association donne rendez-vous à ses Amis et à ceux qui ne le sont pas encore...
Un livre de François Matton regroupant les dessins réalisés durant cette année d’Oeuvres Nomades paraîtra au mois de mars 2007 aux éditions P.O.L.
Chaque soirée Œuvres Nomades a également donné lieu à une pièce sonore réalisée par Radio Primitive, qui seront prochainement diffusées sur ses ondes (92.4 FM).
céleste boursier-mougenot / états seconds
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FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents états seconds, an exhibition of the recent works of artist and composer Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. This project is produced in partnership with the musical creation studio Césaré.
Though Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has been exhibiting his works exclusively in contemporary art milieus for the past decade, he nevertheless considers himself first and foremost as a musician. From 1985 to 1994, he worked as the composer for playwright and director Pascal Rambert’s company, “Side One Posthume Théâtre”. He then decided to give his music independent form. Both open, yet contingent, his compositions are of an immersive, permanent nature. They are mostly produced live, and are generally liberated from the traditional notion of a musical discourse, inscribed within a fixed period of time and impervious to external events. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot maintains that his work as a composer consists of harmonizing the means of presenting his musical works with their content. He does so by creating a situation, both between the works themselves and in relation to a given place, favoring the listening experience. This is necessarily achieved through organization of the physical space. Auditory perception differs discernibly according to the position of the body, whether seated, reclining, or walking, and according to how the point of view is solicited. Artists sometimes remind us just how creation, always timeless, is free from preconceptions, established structures, and institutions separating the artistic disciplines.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot has based his compositional method upon the act of listening, which he qualifies as distracted, and which he endeavors to achieve in his works. This disposition is not so much one of the listener’s being inattentive, but of being freed instead from the autocratic necessity of having to be silent, to be in place from beginning to end, and having to wait for the crescendo con espressione. The visitor can instead leave off or take up listening again according to will, to establish his presence while wandering within the perceptible perimeter and volume of the work, without this resulting in the least significant loss. In this sense, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s works proceed from a sculptural unfolding of what can be qualified as, for want of a better word, installation.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot likes to play upon the disjunction or discontinuity of sources: video is treated as an audio signal; harmonicas are mounted on the mouths of a battalion of vacuum cleaners; a microphone is suspended from a ball. The production of sound is rendered visible through a technical system which, before our eyes, materializes the principle of composition, freeing up the audience from questions relating to “narrative” determination and provenance of the music, as though the musical score were entirely contained in the non-fortuitous encounter between the objects making up the installation. The sounds of our environment, the sonorous facts resulting from purely mundane actions are spontaneously produced by the mechanisms in which movement captivates the view. The tapping rhythm of a bird’s beak in a feeder, the sound of a car passing or of a chair scraping as it is moved, the clicking of a radiator in a museum or the clanging of intertwining metal hangers, a bowl of porcelain, the familiar sounds of breakfast. The fact of showing the concrete how, from what and from where the music originates, not only encourages the hearing of music, but also the openness to the experience of it. This work achieves above all an incredible trueness in its balance between the visible and the audible, in its accommodation of architecture, the environment, and the presence of visitors, who, momentarily, become an integral part of the work.
Following upon the FRAC inaugurated artist residencies of Yan Pei-Ming in 2003, and Franz Ackermann in 2005, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot will reside in Rheims on several different occasions over the summer of 2006. Several installations will be presented, in conjunction with the “Flâneries Musicales de Reims”, in the rooms at the Collège / Frac Champagne-Ardenne, but also in the chapel at the entry of the old Collège des Jésuites, as well as in the splendid Gallo-Roman underground site of the Cryptoportique, place du Forum.
Among the new works to be produced for this monographic exhibition is index, an installation for an acoustic Disklavier piano, powered by a computerized network of keyboards. The project is based on the idea that all text, both potentially and literally, harbors music. It is noteworthy that in French, Italian and Spanish, the words naming music (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti) come from the first syllables of a medieval religious hymn. In English and German, the first letters of the alphabet are used to designate the notes. During the exhibition, therefore, the administrative activity of the FRAC will be spontaneously recycled in a musical composition. In addition, a new version of the installation, from here to ear, for birds and electric guitars will also be presented.
A studio set up in the very center of the exhibition will allow the artist to develop his works-in-progress. These include ballon (provisional title), in which a cordless microphone, hung from a helium-inflated balloon, floats and moves among eight speakers and four fans, thereby generating a feedback effect. This stridence is then harnessed through electronic and spatial manipulation to become music. Flamme (provisional title) is another research project. Here, part of a candle flame vacillates from the draft coming from the covering of a loudspeaker, which is itself playing the sound of the image being filmed by a nearby video camera.
The installation, untitled (series 4), will be presented in the semi-darkness of the Cryptoportique. This work was instrumental in the discovery of the work of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, as much in New York at the Paula Cooper Gallery, as at the capcMusée de Bordeaux. The version featured in this exhibition belongs to the collection of the FRAC Lorraine. It consists of a trio of blue, inflatable pools filled with porcelain bowls, accompanied by white chairs. The water is churned and heated at 30°C. This naturally amplifies the resonance of the white bowls and stemware, which float on the surface, gently bumping into each other, and filling the space with a music as bewitching as that of a Balinese gamelan concert.
In conjunction with the états seconds exhibition, a book offering a comprehensive survey of his artistic activity, will be published in partnership with the Arles publisher Analogues.
Céleste Boursier-Mougenot was born in Nice in 1961. He currently lives in Sète.
robin rhode / the storyteller
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From March 3rd to May 7th 2006, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first monographic exhibition in France of the work of South African artist Robin Rhode. During the course of his residence in Reims between November 2005 and February 2006, he has created works marking an important and original stage in his development. He will present an ensemble of his films, videos and photographic series produced since 2000. He will also present « The Storyteller », a work created especially for this exhibition.
Robin Rhode works on the walls of the cities he explores, creating mini-narratives in which he himself often figures. He uses white chalk, charcoal, watercolor, industrial black paint or even, with the help of bricks, objects around which he develops a pantomime heavily imbued with street culture. His drawings are rapidly executed, reducing the objects - a phone booth, a jazz band, a skate-board - to their most essential, most elementary forms. Music is also a preponderant element in the very immediate universe he describes.
Rhode’s language derives from his own cultural experiences. Though ostensibly he doesn’t lay claim to them, they nonetheless build the codes of a personal mythology that is eminently sensitive and poetic. In this way, he recounts a formative experience in his work, an initiation rite of South African schoolchildren, which he assimilated as a form of artistic education. The tallest student drew on toilet walls, depicting everyday objects (a candle) or objects of consumer desire ( a bicycle), with which the new students had to interact, miming their usage.
The characters that he stages are evocations of strange attempts at living, like so many allegories of the human condition. He pulls an anchor from out of the water, awkwardly catches objects falling from the sky, dismantles a truck by effacing, one by one, the lines of its contours, shakes a flag made of bricks, takes shelter under black rain, cultivates plants intended to form his own deathbed, or gathers tree branches to then draw them tight like the strings of an instrument. Robin Rhode’s work belies an acute, nuanced awareness of the ambivalence of the contemporary world, wherein each tries to negotiate a place for themselves, if only a fragile one. While he seems to warn us of the illusion of systems of representation in a sweetly melancholic tone, tinged with irony and the burlesque, he does so only to remind us of the power of the imagination as both vector of resistance and a condition for taking action. The object is a sign which, freed from its utilitarian dimension, crystallizes another negotiation that links us to desire. All of Robin Rhode’s work subtly handles this complex shift, that of orienting us towards desire, towards the very distance separating us, and which paradoxically drives our capacity to act in the world.
radio kills the video stars / side b
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Oeuvres de Liliana Bassarab, Isabelle Cornaro, Adriana Garcia Galan, Benoît Maire, Mihnea Mircan, Wagner Morales, Emilie Pitoiset, Koki Tanaka, Adam Vackar.
En partenariat avec le Pavillon, Laboratoire de recherches artistiques du Palais de Tokyo, Site de création contemporaine, Paris.
Cette exposition, dont le titre facétieux détourne un tube pop fameux, fait le constat d’une résurgence d’œuvres sonores dans la création plastique actuelle. Essentiellement composée d’œuvres récemment acquises par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, l’exposition interroge les nouvelles règles de composition et les nouveaux modes de création aussi bien dans le domaine musical que dans celui de l’art contemporain.
Cette rencontre entre la musique et les arts visuels résulte souvent d’une réflexion sur la notion même d’objet d’art mais également sur les limites des institutions auxquelles ceux-ci sont destinés. Musées ou salles de concert conditionnent des formes d’art qui n’entendent pas rester figées. Ainsi, des musiciens tels que Céleste Boursier-Mougenot ou Carsten Nicolaï, sans jamais se départir de leurs propres recherches musicales investissent de façon volontaire et naturelle des lieux d’exposition.
De grands artistes mènent également aujourd’hui une carrière de musicien : Par exemple, Christian Marclay, dont on verra bientôt un important projet autour de la collection du Musée de la Musique à Paris et qui dans une œuvre acquise cette année par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, conjugue le reportage photo dans la lignée des graffitis de Brassaï, avec l’ « interdétermination » et l’ouverture musicale que John Cage a apporté à la création contemporaine. C’est également le cas du jeune artiste Davide Balula dont le travail remarquablement silencieux et poétique n’en est pas moins le fruit des recherches musicales qu’il mène en parallèle.
Par ailleurs, d’autres artistes font des propositions qui questionnent de façon radicale et nouvelle la sculpture ou l’installation en tirant un parti inattendu des théories musicales les plus récentes. Ceal Floyer propose ainsi un dialogue entre installation sculpturale et technique du déphasage telle que Steve Reich a pu la définir et la développer.
Enfin, la musique est fortement liée à des contextes sociaux et culturels qui en font souvent la force. Caecilia Tripp dans sa relecture d’un texte de Gertrude Stein remet ainsi en perspective la créolisation de la culture afro-américaine au travers du rythme de la parole mais aussi de la musique hip-hop. Plus près de nous Danica Dakic dans un camp de réfugiés Roms au Kosovo utilise la musique comme un moteur de libération et de cristallisation des zones sombres de l’Histoire récente de l’Europe.
Sur une proposition de Laurence Hazout Dreyfus, à partir du 12 janvier, une dizaine d’artistes du Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, formation post-diplôme internationale, présenteront au FRAC des œuvres inspirées de l’exposition et remettront en perspective les interrogations nées de ce dialogue entre arts plastiques et musique. Ce sera également l’occasion d’une nouvelle présence de jeunes artistes internationaux en Champagne-Ardenne.
radio kills the video stars / side a
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Oeuvres de Davide Balula, Célèste Boursier-Mougenot, Danica Dakic, Ceal Floyer, Jesper Just, Jan Kopp, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolaï, Caecilia Tripp.
Cette exposition, dont le titre facétieux détourne un tube pop fameux, fait le constat d’une résurgence d’œuvres sonores dans la création plastique actuelle. Essentiellement composée d’œuvres récemment acquises par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, l’exposition interroge les nouvelles règles de composition et les nouveaux modes de création aussi bien dans le domaine musical que dans celui de l’art contemporain.
Cette rencontre entre la musique et les arts visuels résulte souvent d’une réflexion sur la notion même d’objet d’art mais également sur les limites des institutions auxquelles ceux-ci sont destinés. Musées ou salles de concert conditionnent des formes d’art qui n’entendent pas rester figées. Ainsi, des musiciens tels que Céleste Boursier-Mougenot ou Carsten Nicolaï, sans jamais se départir de leurs propres recherches musicales investissent de façon volontaire et naturelle des lieux d’exposition.
De grands artistes mènent également aujourd’hui une carrière de musicien : Par exemple, Christian Marclay, dont on verra bientôt un important projet autour de la collection du Musée de la Musique à Paris et qui dans une œuvre acquise cette année par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, conjugue le reportage photo dans la lignée des graffitis de Brassaï, avec l’ « interdétermination » et l’ouverture musicale que John Cage a apporté à la création contemporaine. C’est également le cas du jeune artiste Davide Balula dont le travail remarquablement silencieux et poétique n’en est pas moins le fruit des recherches musicales qu’il mène en parallèle.
Par ailleurs, d’autres artistes font des propositions qui questionnent de façon radicale et nouvelle la sculpture ou l’installation en tirant un parti inattendu des théories musicales les plus récentes. Ceal Floyer propose ainsi un dialogue entre installation sculpturale et technique du déphasage telle que Steve Reich a pu la définir et la développer.
Enfin, la musique est fortement liée à des contextes sociaux et culturels qui en font souvent la force. Caecilia Tripp dans sa relecture d’un texte de Gertrude Stein remet ainsi en perspective la créolisation de la culture afro-américaine au travers du rythme de la parole mais aussi de la musique hip-hop. Plus près de nous Danica Dakic dans un camp de réfugiés Roms au Kosovo utilise la musique comme un moteur de libération et de cristallisation des zones sombres de l’Histoire récente de l’Europe.
Sur une proposition de Laurence Hazout Dreyfus, à partir du 12 janvier, une dizaine d’artistes du Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, formation post-diplôme internationale, présenteront au FRAC des œuvres inspirées de l’exposition et remettront en perspective les interrogations nées de ce dialogue entre arts plastiques et musique. Ce sera également l’occasion d’une nouvelle présence de jeunes artistes internationaux en Champagne-Ardenne.
franz ackermann
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Residence / encounter beginning 17 May /
Exhibition from 3 June to 30 October 2005 /
private viewing Thursday 2 June 2005 beginning 6pm /
Travel, movement, a sense of place, these are central to the work of Franz Ackermann. For him they are a method of working, a recurrent theme and an essential element in the creation of his art. Ackermann, though basically a painter, eagerly combines techniques and materials. Murals, photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and architectural elements compose organic worlds that are invasive, dense, symphonic, baroque and psychedelic. His work makes a powerful statement, completely taking over the spectator, submerging us in a flood of flamboyant colours. Circular and spiral movements reinforce the sensation of primeval chaos in works which for all that are perfectly controlled and composed.
Franz Ackermann skilfully combines two discrepant scales. The one is pocket-sized, journey-sized, close to his favourite theme of Mental Maps. These are imaginary topographies of towns he passes through. Feelings, memories and a subjective view of a foreign environment conjure up a kind of automatic writing. These little watercolours or brightly-coloured drawings with their oval shapes, resemble improbable stratigraphical soundings in a new version of the traditional travel sketch.
Evasions, on the other hand, is a series of gigantic pictures, monumental paintings that Franz Ackermann creates in his Berlin studio. These canvases are composed of broad sweeps of explosive colours, undulating watery shapes with unstable perspectives, whirling, concentric or receding, creating a disturbing visual tension, a permanent diversion from reality. In these installations, the spectator is faced with contradictory forces brought to bear both inside and outside the paintings, projecting us into the very heart of the composition.
The human figure is absent from Ackermann's work, with the exception of the image of the artist who from time to time manifests his ubiquity in a photograph or a figure representing him. However, his painting powerfully asserts that it is anchored in the social, geographical and anthropological realities of the contemporary world. They refer to the real but not to the visible. Ackermann offers us a vision rather than a point of view, a psycho-geography rather than a cartography or a rational analysis of territory. The works of Ackermann invent their own approaches to the world, where the banal and the hallucinatory, the trivial and the apocalyptic combine in an explosive perspective of utter novelty.
From 3 June to 30 October 2005, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first one-man show in France of this German artist. Ackermann is one of the principal representatives of a renewal of painting in Germany. His work has been on show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Biennale in Sao Paulo (2002) and in Venice (2004), at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in the Neugerriemschneider galleries in Berlin, Fortes Villaça in Sao Paulo, and Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. He is also one of the artists nominated for the 2004 Hugo Boss prize organised by the Guggenheim in New York. Franz Ackermann has designed an original project for the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne exhibition area.
Curators : Grazia Quaroni and François Quintin.
In conjunction with the exhibition an exhibition catalogue has been published by the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, with the Presses du Réel, designed by M/M graphic artists, Paris.
jeunisme II
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Works by Gilles Balmet, Nicolas Boulard, Sylvain Bourget, Benoît Broisat, Julie Faure-Brac, Elie Cristiani, Julien Discrit, Ariane Michel, Jean-Rémy Papleux, Mathieu Simon.
Two years on from the exhibition Jeunisme 1, the Champagne-Ardenne regional contemporary art foundation is repeating its forward-looking experiment. The term "jeunisme" has often been used as a reproach, and rightly so, against institutional projects where mere youth is the aesthetic justification. Better, perhaps, to view the term "jeunisme" as a deliberate statement of intent, a possible and desirable commitment in favour of new work – bearing in mind that youthfulness in art is not a question of age, but rather one of constant evolution, of a determination to move in uncertain directions.
These exhibitions are meant to give a first sight of newly-created works by artists who have not yet won recognition from art institutions, and as such they seek deliberately to support creativity at the moment when it is often at its most fragile.
Jeunisme 2 is fed by the same commitment towards these artists. This exhibition not only affords them financial and logistic help to take the step of presenting new work in public, but also gives us an experimental area where the work can be revealed with all its vulnerability, its awakening questions and the individual sensitivity of each artist: Gilles Balmet, Nicolas Boulard, Sylvain Bourget, Benoît Broisat, Julie Faure-Brac, Elie Cristiani, Julien Discrit, Ariane Michel, Jean-Rémy Papleux and Mathieu Simon.
Whether self-taught, recently graduated from art school, or artists who have been producing work for several years, for many of them this is the first opportunity to unveil a new work in an institutional setting and place it before the public.
Jeunisme 2 is also an opportunity to bring together some major cultural figures from Reims who support contemporary art. The event Jeunisme 2 has been designed in partnership with, among others, the Saint-Exupéry cultural centre and the musical creation studio Césaré. The exhibition has been mounted in conjunction with the exhibitions of the cultural centre for childhood in Tinqueux.
lutz, une monographie
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Oeuvres de Jean-Luc Moulène, Matt Mullican, Philippe Ramette, Joe Scanlan, Wolfgang Tillmans , David Ballu, Giasco Bertoli, Philippe Cazal, Claude Closky, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Reine Graves, Jonathan Hallam, Petra Lindholm, Laurent Montaron.
L’exposition Lutz, une monographie tente de s’émanciper des connexions forcées entre art et mode qui ont jalonné les années 1990. Elle se propose de révéler les codes de la mode Lutz en impliquant le dispositif spatial, mais aussi, par capillarité, les objets (art ou images) choisis pour leur capacité à offrir un regard contextualisé aux vêtements. En partant du principe que le musée est, par essence, un lieu de transaction impossible (contrairement à la boutique à laquelle la survie de la mode est associée), exposer de la mode revient à exposer un "lifestyle", un climat adéquat à la lisibilité du vêtement Lutz hors de toute fonction mercantile. L’exposition Lutz, une monographie consiste donc à établir un cadre idéal, une bulle environnementale en affinité avec la construction spécifique de silhouettes clefs issues des archives Lutz.
Lutz, le style
Depuis mars 2000, date de sa première collection, Lutz se plaît à redonner vie aux classiques de la garde-robe. Allemand made in France, il étonne le milieu de la mode lassé des vagues rétro en pratiquant des hybridations d’un genre nouveau : combinaison de travail pailletée « soir », veste de smoking façon blouson de sport, manteau se dézippant en bustier ou trench jouant les cache-cœur. De saison en saison, Lutz séduit en repoussant les limites du vestiaire fonctionnel (chemise, veste, jupe, etc.). Plus cérébral de l’étoffe qu’amateur de frou-frou, il invente une construction contemporaine à nos vêtements de base, pour un porté à la fois connu et inédit.
Commissariat
Nés respectivement en 1969 et 1972, Samuel Drira et Sybille Walter créent le magazine de mode et d’art ENCENS en 2001. Travaillant en binôme, ils ont en commun le goût d’une rigueur sans fioriture qui caractérise leur démarche. Après avoir défendu les créations de Lutz depuis son premier défilé, le moment leur a semblé propice de conjuguer les vingt ans du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne avec le dixième opus du créateur allemand au sein d’une exposition qui serait comme le prolongement en 3D d’une exploration d’un style investie depuis 14 numéros.
Biographie Lutz
Natif de Remscheid en Allemagne, Lutz étudie la mode à la Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design de Londres. Après avoir été responsable de la maille et de la collection « artisanale » chez le créateur anversois Martin Margiela durant quatre ans, il lance sa marque à Paris en mars 2000. Avec son alter ego et associé David Ballu pour la diffusion et le développement de sa griffe, il réussit à convaincre des boutiques prestigieuses dans le monde de le soutenir. Aujourd’hui doté de nombreux points de vente à Paris et dans le monde, il continue d’évoluer sur la base d’un classicisme retravaillé dont le pragmatisme met en avant la personnalité de celui qui le porte.
www.encensrevue.com
célébration !
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Exposition anniversaire des 20 ans du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne a développé très tôt une attitude généreuse, ouverte et engagée dans la proximité avec les artistes et la création en marche, grâce à son attachement à produire, réaliser et être acteur de l’émergence de ce jeune patrimoine. C’est en novembre 1984 que le Fonds régional d’art contemporain voit le jour, soutenu dès le départ par la Région Champagne-Ardenne, et bien sûr l’Etat, par l’intermédiaire du Ministère de la Culture à l’initiative de ce nouveau type d’institution culturelle. Quatre directeurs ont apporté leur vision et ont éclairci à leur façon l’accès à la création de notre temps : Catherine Bompuis, de 1985 à 1988, Laurence Imbernon de 1988 à 1993, Nathalie Ergino de 1994 à 2000, et moi-même, François Quintin depuis avril 2001.
Comme dans les autres régions françaises, le Fonds régional d’art contemporain Champagne-Ardenne a pour vocation de constituer et de diffuser une collection d’art contemporain, de programmer et de réaliser des expositions originales, d’éditer des documents, d’organiser des actions de sensibilisation et de formation de publics divers (scolaires, étudiants, adultes, entreprises). Dans une volonté d’ouverture, l’équipe du FRAC est attentive à la diversité des publics, et multiplie les actions culturelles au cœur d’environnements sociaux dont l’éloignement à la création de leur temps est, pour certain, plus marqué que pour d’autre. D’une manière générale, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne tend à promouvoir tout ce qui concourt à la création et à la promotion de l’art contemporain.
Depuis 1990, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne est installé dans l’aile droite de l’Ancien Collège des Jésuites, bâtiment historique du XVIIème siècle.
L’année 2004 est l’occasion d’une célébration. Des expositions, des événements mettent en perspective les pièces majeures des quelques 611 œuvres qui composent cette collection. Plusieurs présentations thématiques dessinent un parcours de plusieurs lieux de la Ville de Reims, partenaire privilégié de ce projet. Le premier catalogue exhaustif de la collection verra le jour cet automne. Ce livre comme les expositions racontent à leur façon l’histoire de vingt années d’activisme culturel, une histoire dans laquelle de nombreux artistes, créateurs, réalisateurs, penseurs, critiques d’art, invités par les directions successives et leur comité technique, et accompagnées dans cette aventure du soutien sans faille de l’Etat, de la Région Champagne-Ardenne, puis de la Ville de Reims, ont vécu un véritable tournant champardennais.
A l'occasion de cette exposition, l'artiste Pierre Giner développe un projet spécifique qui remet en perspective l'ensemble des activités et composantes du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne. Miscellaneous (spaces) est un jeu vidéo, un générateur aléatoire de mises en espace d'une collection. Collection d'œuvres d'art et de leurs images, au sein de laquelle circule le spectateur, pris dans le dédale de toutes leurs possibles mise en place.
Miscellaneous (spaces) est un outil de réflexion, de spéculation, d'anticipation, sur une collection et ce qu'elle contient comme potentiels d'expositions. Où l'ensemble des oeuvres est considéré pour ses innombrables variabilités spatiales. Ainsi celles-ci produisent leurs espaces, successivement, indéfiniment.
Miscellaneous (spaces) est un autre outil parmi ceux du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, au même titre que la réserve, le cabinet d'édition, le lieu de diffusion vidéo, le "white cube". Tous nécessaires à l'institution, habituellement visibles ou invisibles. Tous déployés pour l'occasion dans les murs de l'Ancien Collège, autour du jeu lui-même.
Commissaires de l'exposition : François Quintin et Pierre Giner
adel abdessemed / habibi
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Adel Abdessemed quitte l’Algérie en 1995. Il poursuit en France les études qu’il avait entamées à l’école des Beaux-Arts d’Alger. Bien des années auparavant, il avait affirmé vouloir devenir artiste après la découverte dans le petit Larousse d’une reproduction en vignette de la célèbre Femme se baignant dans la rivière de Rembrandt. Adel Abdessemed ne s’est jamais départi de cette qualité de saisir dans le foisonnement du monde la part essentielle vers laquelle tend toute son exigence esthétique, avec une justesse qui dévoile une pensée qui vient du cœur.
Le travail d’Adel Abdessemed s’exprime par la vidéo, la photographie, le dessin, l’écriture et l’édition de livres d’artiste. Souvent en réaction à des situations vécues, il aborde la question des contraintes liées à l’identité culturelle politique ou spirituelle des sociétés, tant au cœur même des cultures, qu’elles soient occidentales, islamiques ou autres, que dans l’hybridation de celles-ci; une mixité dont lui-même enrichit ses réflexions mais subit parfois aussi les injustices. Un des sujets récurrents est celui du corps libéré des contraintes de la culture, la religion, la politique, les a priori idéologiques des sociétés...
Souvent énigmatiques les contenus des oeuvres d’Adel Abdessemed se nourrissent fortement de la rencontre que le spectateur en fait. C’est un travail qu’il faut appréhender avec égoïsme, pour soi, laissant libre le dialogue intérieur qui d’abord nous trouble, et finalement nous enrichit. Adel Abdessemed aime à dire, “ce que je veux c’est changer les gens”. Derrière cette ambition démesurée, il faut voir un geste généreux d’un artiste qui s’adresse avec insistance aux méandres de nos interdits et notre inconscient.
Dans l’espace, un squelette de dix-sept mètres de long est en lévitation à deux mètres du sol. Il est accompagné dans son sommeil aérien d’un réacteur d’avion, potentiel de puissance. Habibi est une invitation au voyage intérieur, comme si l’espace d’exposition était une peau, la surface, l’abri d’un corps absent, non seulement humain, mais aussi le corps d’une pensée en suspension, d’une attente silencieuse. Son titre, Habibi (mon chéri), emprunté à une chanson d’amour de la diva libanaise Fairuz, suggère immédiatement l’univers d’une intimité décalée...
L’oeuvre habibi est produite par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
yan pei-ming / le fils du dragon : chantier / funérailles
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Une grande renommée internationale précède Yan Pei-Ming, peintre chinois, installé à Dijon depuis 1980. La résidence et l’exposition Le Fils du Dragon : Chantier/Funérailles au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne incorpore de façon originale l’ensemble d’un dispositif rétrospectif qui cet été consacre sa carrière en Bourgogne ; une sorte de prolongation en forme d’appendice. L’artiste s’approprie l’espace d’exposition du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne et en fait le lieu d’une recherche picturale et d’une réflexion “à chaud” sur l’ensemble de son œuvre disposée sur les murs du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, du Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, des musées d’art et d’Histoire de Genève en collaboration avec le Consortium, centre d’art contemporain à Dijon.
Yan Pei-Ming aime à dire qu’il lui faut vingt ans et quinze minutes pour réussir un portrait. Tout se joue dans l’acte. Comme le ferait un sportif de haut niveau, il entretient chaque jour davantage sa formidable virtuosité, sa faculté de saisir l’essence du sujet dans la rapidité de quelques gestes aériens, quelques coups de brosse nerveux, sans “fignolage” ni repentir. C’est un artiste compulsif et persévérant qui réalise avec détermination une œuvre peinte dont on ne peut déjà plus faire l’inventaire, et qui reste indépendante des caprices de courants artistiques éphémères. S’il peint essentiellement des portraits en noir ou bien en rouge, Ming ne s’attache pas à la ressemblance. “Mon travail, dit-il, peut être considéré comme une sorte de portrait universel. Ce que je peins dans la permanence est au fond une idée de cette humanité”. Avec des sujets récurrents de l’imagerie chinoise, Ming dépasse sa propre opposition à l’art officiel qu’il a fui, et revisite les icônes d’un Mao ou d’un Bruce Lee aux faciès d’un exotisme désincarné qui vaut pour tous les visages, qu’ils soient victimes, brigands, anonymes, orphelins de Soweto, ou adolescents de Montbéliard.
A Reims, dans les espaces d’exposition du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Ming a travaillé avec la régularité et la conscience d’un employé modèle. Il a réalisé un ensemble de treize toiles sur le thème de la mort. Les peintures sont d’une grande force. La palette s’éclaircie. Sa résidence a permis à de nombreux visiteurs, jeunes artistes, personnalités de la vie culturelle, ou simples curieux, de rencontrer l’artiste, de le voir travailler, mûrir son sujet, attaquer nerveusement la toile, reprendre partie ou tout du travail de la veille… Yan Pei-Ming aborde un sujet difficile mais incontournable. Le peintre de la vie s’attache à rendre des corps sans vie, ceux d’anonymes ou bien de Marylin Monroe, certains corps disposés au milieu des fleurs pour le dernier hommage ou bien d’autres à peine sortis de décombres… Cet ensemble de peintures dépasse le thème du deuil, c’est aussi le manifeste d’un renouveau pour l’artiste, une révolution au sens littéral, comme lorsque sort l’arcane de “la Mort” aux tarots de Marseille ; le rebond surprenant de l’artiste célébré.
Cette exposition est l’occasion d’une publication qui retrace le parcours de cet artiste. Cet ouvrage monographique est publié par les Presses du réel en coédition avec le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon, le Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Besançon, les musées d’art et d’Histoire de Genève, le Consortium, centre d’art contemporain à Dijon, et le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
En février 2004, est prévue la sortie d’un livre-DVD, aux éditions Little Big Man. Ce dernier présentera les reproductions des oeuvres réalisées au cours de la résidence de Yan Pei-Ming au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne et un film de Ludwig Trovato relatant cette aventure.
jeunisme I
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Oeuvres de Delphine Balley, Claire Boissel, Frédéric Brice, Olivier Dominici, Anne Guillaume, Yoann Legrand, Pascal Lièvre, Gaël Pollin, Chantal Raguet, Angéline Tripet, Marie-France Uzac
Le terme de “Jeunisme” a fréquemment été utilisé comme le reproche, souvent légitime, à l’adresse de projets institutionnels dans lesquels la jeunesse seule est l’argument esthétique. On se doit cependant d’être attentif aux travaux naissants d’artistes qui n’ont pas encore de reconnaissance institutionnelle ou publique. Pourquoi ne pas lire ce terme “jeunisme” comme un parti pris de générosité à énoncer, un engagement possible et souhaitable envers la jeune création, tout en gardant à l’esprit que la jeunesse n’est pas une question d’âge. Un lieu dédié à l’art contemporain se doit de porter cette attention prospective.
Ainsi, en cette fin d’hiver, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne est atteint de “Jeunisme”, et initie une série d’expositions consacrées à la toute jeune génération d’artistes. Onze artistes français présentent leurs travaux : Delphine Balley, Frédéric Brice, Claire Boissel, Olivier Dominici, Anne Guillaume, Pascal Lièvre, Yoann Legrand, Gaël Pollin, Chantal Raguet, Angéline Tripet, Marie-France Uzac. Certains sont tout juste diplômés des écoles en France, d’autres ont récemment découvert leur vocation artistique. C’est pour beaucoup d’entre eux une première occasion de déployer leurs travaux dans un espace institutionnel, et d’en parler à un public non initié. Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne propose à ces artistes un accompagnement, pour leur permettre de produire une œuvre nouvelle, de mettre en place un projet personnel, de favoriser une première édition ou un multiple.
Jeunisme 1 est aussi l’occasion de réunir certains des acteurs culturels de Reims qui soutiennent la création contemporaine. Entre autres, l’événement Jeunisme 1 est conçu en partenariat avec le Centre culturel centre de créations pour l’enfance de Tinqueux, l’association de mécénat d’entreprises PRISME, le Centre culturel Saint-Exupéry, le studio de création musicale Césaré, la Salle d’Attente association pour la promotion de la photographie contemporaine, et le Palais du Tau.
aernout mik
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Né en 1962 à Groningen (Pays-Bas), Aernout Mik vit à Amsterdam et à Berlin.
S'il fallait se convaincre que l'homme n'a pas tout à fait abandonné ses instincts d'animal grégaire, il suffirait de se regarder attendre dans un ascenseur ou une salle des pas-perdus, d'être attentif à nos comportements respectifs avant un concert de rock en plein air, ou bien encore d'observer les attitudes des boursiers autour de la corbeille lorsque le langage est réduit à quelques gestes primaires.
Aernout Mik insuffle à la création vidéo une dimension nouvelle, davantage théâtrale ou chorégraphique. De petites pièces sans parole et sans histoire sont mises en scène avec une grande précision. Libéré de la nécessité d'inscrire ses réalisations dans une logique narrative, Aernout Mik montre les relations contrariées entre un espace et des comportements humains. Ses oeuvres ont souvent quelque chose d'hypnotique. La projection synchronisée des deux points de vue d'une même scène provoque une impression d'ubiquité et piège le regard en exaltant nos facultés d'observation. Le spectateur a le privilège de scruter chaque détail, chaque geste, chaque élément d'un plan cinématographique sans fin et dont il ne comprend pas l’origine. Tout se passe comme si nous arrivions juste après l'événement dont cette attente, ces gesticulations inexpliquées, cette violence latente, ce silence, sont les conséquences muettes. Les acteurs d'Aernout Mik intriguent par la force de leur présence inactive ou l'étrangeté de leurs gestes sans détermination véritable.
Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne est heureux de présenter une nouvelle installation vidéo d'Aernout Mik : Flock, 2002. Le titre signifie "troupeau” en anglais. Un groupe de personnes, majoritairement asiatique,semble en état de transit dans un lieu indéterminé dont on ne parvient pas à définir si c'est en intérieur ou en extérieur, à la tombée du jour ou bien à l'aube. Des chèvres,dont certaines sont mécaniques, bien que parfaitement imitées, évoluent au milieu d'hommes et de femmes qui ont finalement des attitudes très similaires. Ainsi,des animaux, des humains et des androïdes recomposent une cohésion sociale improbable, dont nous sommes les témoins attentifs grâce à ce plan séquence en boucle imperceptible. La scène rappelle confusément des photographies de presse ou des reportages télévisuels sur des réfugiés, des boat people, des prisonniers en attente de jugement. Les images d'une grande beauté déroulent avec lenteur les attentes, les jeux incompréhensibles, les allers et venues, le sommeil, l'anxiété d'une trentaine d'anonymes aux visages emplis de vide, d'espoir ou de désespoir, de pensées insondables, de transe, dans un mouvement en travelling régulier qui semble s'étirer vers l'infini.
Flock (2002) est une oeuvre co-produite par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne ; la Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelone ; le Pori Art Museum, Finlande ; The Project, New York/Los Angeles ; la galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin ; la galerie Massimo de Carlo, Milan.
L’exposition Aernout Mik bénéficie du soutien de la Fondation Mondrian, Amsterdam.
jean-françois texier / boxing queen
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Jean-François Texier « confectionne » une œuvre sensible, où se tissent des émotions intimes aux points de croix, du vague à l’âme au point mousse, une broderie des sentiments et des corps de tricots.
A Ruffec, en Charente, Jean-François Texier excelle dans l’art du tricot, de la couture et de la broderie depuis l’age de 12 ans, initié à cet art par sa grand-mère. Il adapte le crochet, la broderie Richelieu ou le point de feston à la création plastique contemporaine et réalise sa collection de «nouveautés»» qui augmente sans cesse son catalogue personnel : un bas rayé multicolore pour footbaleur et danseuse, des gants aux doigts tentaculaires, ou bien qui se joignent, tricots pour fleurs (des Immortelles...) pélerine au crochet en laine de récupération, lingerie fine exécutée par l’artiste avec des aiguilles de pin, sur un banc des jardin de Mériadeck à Bordeaux, la nuit, en attendant l’amour.
Son intervention dans le cadre du parcours associé de la Biennale de Lyon 2000 mettait en scène une “compétition de pêche au tricot“, à l’issue de laquelle étaient présentés quatre tricots de cordages marins en point mousse, enfilés sur les cannes à pêche qui ont servi à les tricoter. Une œuvre récente présente un petit tricot de laine Mohair de couleur chair, confectionné à l’aide de mines de graphites; ainsi la laine est souillée à mesure qu’elle prend forme.
C’est une œuvre dont la matière première est le temps qui passe, un tissage méticuleux des attentes et des phantasmes. Des aiguilles de Jean François Texier surgit un théâtre d’ombres intimes, des désirs éclots comme les fruits naturels de patience.
Pour l’exposition au FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Jean-Fançois Texier met à profit l’expérience de plusieurs mois de résidence au Centre d’art Passages, résidence d’artistes Ginko de la ville de Troyes, capitale du bas et de la bonetterie, pour la réalisation d’un projet autour de la figure emblématique de la Chanteur franco-américaine Joséphine Baker.
Un catalogue dédié à l’ensemble de l’oeuvre de Jean-François Texier sera édité par le FRAC à l’occasion de l’exposition, en co-édition avec le FRAC Acquitaine.
recent acquisitions
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Works by Saâdane Afif, Tobias Bernstrup, John Bock, Frédéric Coupet, Honoré d'O, Dan Graham, Cécile Le Talec, Glenn Ligon, Mario Merz, Laurent Montaron, Philippe Ramette, Nathalie Rao, Glen Rubsamen, Frances Stark, Annelies Strba, Jean-François Texier
game over city / la ville en jeu
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Oeuvres de Tobias Bernstrup, Virginie Barré et Stéphane Sautour, Pierre Giner, Felix Stephane Huber, Palle Torsson
L'exposition Game over city/la ville en jeux présente plusieurs artistes dont le travail investit le nouveau champ de création que représente le monde des jeux vidéo. Ces artistes portent un regard particulier sur la relation entre l'échelle humaine et le langage architectural. A partir de moteurs graphiques de jeux vidéo, une nouvelle génération de créateurs fait émerger une esthétique numérique, et revisite ainsi le réel dans un monde parallèle. Ils révèlent ainsi les stigmates d'une perception nouvelle du monde. Tobias Bernstrup, Palle Torsson, Felix Stephan Huber, Virginie Barré et Stéphane Sautour, Pierre Giner évoquent ces paysages urbains, des terrains de jeu dont la forme, les décors, les mises en situation sont chargés de significations.
L'artiste français Pierre Giner propose une balade dans un road movie imaginaire. Tobias Bernstrup, artiste suédois, invite le public à déambuler à l'aide d'un "joystick", en parcourant l'urbanité superficielle recomposée de Potsdamer Platz à Berlin, dans un jeu en vision subjective 3D. L'artiste allemand Felix Stephan Huber campe le décor de son jeu de "shoot" au coeur de Alexander Platz, ancienne place centrale de Berlin Est. Des combattants s'affrontent dans ce lieu interstitiel, symbole d'une utopie déchue. Ces deux jeux s'inspirent non pas d'une représentation réelle mais de l'idée que véhicule le Berlin reconstruit. Avec ces oeuvres nous sommes au coeur de la notion de cités génériques, terme que l'architecte théoricien Rem Koolhas utilise pour qualifier les villes nouvelles.
La violence de ces mondes nouveaux est évoquée dans la proposition de Palle Torsson, Sam, où la balade d'une petite fille mitrailleuse, met en exergue la brutalité des comportements composés des personnages de jeux vidéo actuels. Le court métrage d'animation Rouge-Total de Virginie Barré et Stéphane Sautour déroule avec lenteur des images tout à la fois violentes, oniriques et mystérieuses. Ces créations mettent en évidence le formidable réservoir de violence contenue des jeux vidéo, défouloir sans limite que l'attitude physique passive et recroquevillée du "gamer" ne laisse pas transparaître.
emmanuelle huynh thanh-loan et cécile le prado / ellès
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Ellès est une oeuvre issue de la rencontre entre une chorégraphe, Emmanuelle Huynh Thanh-Loan, et une compositrice, Cécile Le Prado.
Le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne s'associant à Césaré, studio de création musicale, et avec le soutien du Manège de Reims Scène nationale, produit cette installation sonore, qui se situe à l'écart des frontières qui séparent traditionnellement danse, musique et arts plastiques.
Ellès est le témoin de l'entrelacs dans lequel nous nous tenons. Le monde imprime ses événements dans nos corps en même temps que ceux-ci ne cessent de le reconfigurer. Il est donc question des répercussions du vaste corps du monde en nous-mêmes ainsi que de la résonance de nos corps singuliers dans ce monde.
Ellès est un geste lisière par lequel la musicienne et la chorégraphe se proposent d'"espacer", c'est-à-dire d'organiser des formes, formes sonores en l'occurrence, dans un comportement spatial.
Les deux artistes travaillent ensemble à créer de petites articulations, objets sonores hybrides entre leurs deux imaginaires. Elles mettent en scène des modèles d'échange dehors-dedans: ondulations, tremblements, propagations, densifications, retraits, immobilité. Le comportement du son dans l'espace, sa chorégraphie proposent une réalité dont le visiteur est invité à faire l'épreuve:tout d'abord à l'intérieur d'un espace périphérique que l'on parcourt seul, à fleur de peau, puis dans un espace central d'écoute partagée.
janaina tschäpe
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La solitude d’un ange, une sirène abandonnée, un visage respire dans une enveloppe fœtale, une femme d’eau en léthargie, les œuvres de Janaina Tschäpe apparaissent comme les souvenirs en fragments d’un rêve confus d’une nuit d’été.
De nationalité brésilienne, Janaina Tschäpe est née en 1973 en Allemagne et vit à New York. Une exposition monographique récente au Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia à Madrid, ainsi qu’à la Galerie Catherine Bastide à Bruxelles, ont révélé en Europe le travail fascinant de cette jeune artiste germano-brésilienne. A travers la photographie, la vidéo, le dessin, la sculpture ou même l’installation, Janaina Tschäpe utilise son corps comme modèle d’une mythologie personnelle hybride, dans laquelle fourmillent des références, des légendes de la Grèce Antique, ou des mondes imaginaires des contes nordiques.
D’une qualité chromatique rare, ses images confondent avec finesse la mélancolie de la peinture et la photographie victorienne, le cinéma néo-réaliste et les modes fragmentés d’expressions contemporaines de la vidéo et de la photographie plasticienne. Les images sont des produits directs de l’imagination. L’intensité fictionnelle de ses œuvres, leur force narrative contrastent avec la simplicité des moyens mis en œuvre pour ces mises en scènes: décors naturels, accessoires réalisés par l’artiste à partir de matériaux modestes.
Cette artiste aux vies multiples identifie ses propres craintes et fantasmes aux personnages en lesquels elle modèle sa métamorphose. Janaina Tschäpe emporte toujours sa robe de sirène ou ses ailes d’anges et poursuit ses vies parallèles au gré des lieux, des décors, des lumières, où des contingences la mènent. Janaina Tschäpe affirme avant tout un pouvoir créateur qui lui permet, en tous lieux, de déployer en des vies simultanées les métamorphoses divaguantes des figures essentielles de l’intime. A Reims, elle prend possession de lieux magiques, la charpente de la cathédrale, la bibliothèque et les anciennes cuisines du Collège des Jésuites par exemple, qui deviennent décors de nouvelles transformations habitées d’une inquiétude douce.
A l’occasion de cette exposition, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne édite une publication, véritable projet d’artiste sur la série inédite des Petites morts, série photographique que l’artiste mène depuis de nombreuses années.
alchimie de la rencontre
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Oeuvres de Alice Anderson, Kader Attia, Marina Babakoff et Jérôme Devanne, Borderland, James Lee Byars, Claude Closky, Eric Duyckaerts, Gilbert and George, Douglas Gordon, Joseph Grigely, Jonathan Monk, Laurent Montaron, Yan Pei-Ming, Valérie Mrejen, Marylène Negro, Cai Guo-Qiang, Philippe Ramette, Jean-François Texier, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Angel Vergara
La rencontre avec l’objet d’art porte en elle tous les potentiels de trouble, de confusion qui d’un moment simple de contemplation engage subitement l’avenir avec l’emportement d’un coup de foudre.
Les œuvres de cette Alchimie parlent de rencontres. Celle d’une personne que l’on va peut-être embrasser si elle a les yeux verts, celle d’une petite annonce, et celle que l’on attend en tricotant assis sur un banc des jardins de Mériadeck. Il y a la rencontre des différences ; celle aussi de deux petites filles qui partagent un gâteau; ou bien des rencontres futiles où règnent un protocole insipide et cruel. Il y a encore la rencontre avec soi-même, comme lorsqu’on se réveille d’un sommeil amnésique dans la ville d’un amour passé. Il y a enfin celle avec les autres, tous les autres, ceux auxquels un journal ou un billet de train nous relient, tous ceux dont l’artiste fait la rencontre par l’offrande généreuse d’un bonbon savoureux, ou d’une infusion aux champignons bénéfiques. L’artiste nous lègue l’objet qui sera l’ambassadeur de sa rencontre avec chacun : l’œuvre, à l’image d’un bijou précieux qu’il porte sur la main près du coeur.
new acquisitions
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Oeuvres de Jimmie Durham, Robert Filliou, Rodney Graham, Yuri Leiderman, Regina Möller, Uri Tzaig
Une collection institutionnelle développe peu à peu son identité dans une progression presque organique, comme l’individu modifie sa personnalité à mesure d’acquis successifs parfois déterminés, parfois simplement contingents.
La collection du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne est composée de 400 œuvres datées de 1963 à 2000, regroupant des pratiques aussi diversifiées que la peinture, la sculpture, la photographie, l’installation, la vidéo... Si certaines œuvres ont un caractère davantage historique et témoignent des avancées les plus récentes de la pensée artistique (les œuvres de Robert Filliou, Raymond Hains ou Jimmie Durham en sont quelques exemples), le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne a néanmoins acquis une grande notoriété grâce à sa politique de production d’œuvres en concordance avec les orientations des acquisitions, en particulier en direction d’artistes actuels ou de la jeune génération dont la plupart sont déjà reconnus sur un plan national et international. C’est le cas de John Bock, de Laurent Montaron ou bien de Regina Möller. La collection résulte du choix d’un comité technique consultatif d’achat dirigé par le directeur du FRAC.
Mais la collection du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne est avant tout un outil déterminant pour faire connaître les avancées de la création de notre temps. Le FRAC travaille à la constitution d’un véritable patrimoine vivant. La collection permet à chacun d’approcher l’art de notre époque avant même qu’il ne subisse les distorsions du temps, qu’il ne se charge des a priori critiques de l’Histoire.
saâdane afif / poetic lambda
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A la suite de sa participation à plusieurs expositions collectives, notamment l’exposition Sensitive au Printemps de Cahors, en 2000, Poétic Lambda est la première exposition personnelle en France de Saâdane Afif. Cette exposition présente un projet original pour les espaces d’expositions du FRAC Champagne-Ardenne.
Né en 1970 à Vendôme, Saâdane Afif vit à Nantes.
Intégrant dans sa démarche un travail qu’il qualifie lui-même de “guetteur”, Sâadane Afif développe une attitude sensible aux signes qui nous entourent pour leur faire subir un déplacement, une dérive poétique, par la mise en œuvre de dispositifs fragiles et précaires, de bricolages atypiques et hybrides.
Sâadane Afif opère des collages de sources iconographiques anachroniques ou des distorsions d’échelles visuelles et sonores, jouant sur la rencontre cacophonique des objets et des juxtapositions d’images. La mise en jeu des interférences et des relations tissées entre ses œuvres lui permettent de générer un processus de circulation sémantique.
Poétic lambda est une construction personnelle sans règles ni méthodes, qui s’effectue dans le mouvement accidentel des évènements, rencontres et voyages entrepris, dans une tentative de saisir l’insaisissable, d’organiser le chaos, tel un champ illimité et mouvant de tous les possibles. Ainsi chaque œuvre est l’occasion d’un changement de médiums, de repères, tant avec des assemblages composites que des maquettes, prototypes, sons, photographies, objets récupérés...
“Saâdane Afif se tient dans la posture du voyageur, c’est à dire de celui qui observe les paysages et entend des langues inconnues(...). Peu lui importent la véracité des faits, des expériences ; il n’est ni nomade ni anthropologue. Son rapport au déplacement est autre, qui aurait pour nom: ”tourisme aléatoire”. (...). Il ne s’agit pas pour lui de s’approprier les choses mais de les indiquer; comme on le fait de l’index pour diriger l’intention de l’autre. Ses pièces procédent donc de ce découpage, qui déplace le regard d’un point à l’autre et désigne une direction, une perspective.” (Lili Reynaud, ”Poétic Lambda”, Galerie Michel Rein, septembre 2000)
A l’occasion de cette exposition, le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne publie en co-édition un ouvrage portant sur les travaux récents de Saâdane Afif.
new acquisitions
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Works by Eric Duyckaerts, Robert Filliou, Alain Jacquet, Cristian Lapie, Philippe Mayaux, Gustav Metzger, Laurent Montaron, Thierry Perthuisot, Jacqueline Salmon, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Angel Vergara
new acquisitions 98
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Works by Jean-Michel Alberola, Michel François, Raymond hains, Richard Hamilton, Pierre Huyghe, Matt Mullican, Xavier Noiret-Thomé, Rainer Oldendorf, Dieter Roth, Adrian Schiess.
new acquisitions 97
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Works by Stéphane Calais, François Curlet, Willie Doherty, Alain Jacquet, Harald Klingelhöller, Regina Möller, Sylvie Plateau, Bernhard Rüdiger, Joe Scanlan, Angel Vergara, James Welling.
new acquisitions 95
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Works by Chris Burden, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Stéphane Calais, Erik Dietman, Jimmie Durham, Jef Geys, Pierre Joseph, Jean-Luc Moulène, Philippe Ramette, Christophe Vigouroux.
maisons-cerveaux
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Works by Stéphane Calais, Hubert Duprat, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Fabrice Hybert, Matthias Lengner, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, Angel Vergara.
voyage imaginaire / mai de la photo
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Oeuvres de Alberto Garcia Alix, Thierry Lefebure, Pere Formiguera, Martin Garcia, Douglas Keats, Claude Nori, Françoise Nunez, Bernard Plossu, Wojciek Prazmowski, Jean-Philippe Reverdot, Cristina Zelich.
la traversée des mirages, photographie du québec / transfrontalières
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Oeuvres de Patrick Altman, Angela Grauerholz, Roberto Pellegrinuzzi, Denis Farley, Alain Paiement.
écritures de lumière / mai de la photo
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Oeuvres de Raymond Hains, Lothar Baumgarten, Dieter Appelt, Paolo Gioli, Jean le Gac, Ger Van Elk, Bernard Faucon, Henry Lewis, Hubert Duprat.
invitation
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Oeuvres de Pascal Bacicca, Xavier Bertheau, Florence Kutten, Annie Lasserre, Frédéric Voulize, Lydie Weirich.
de architectura
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Oeuvres de John Coplans, Gérard Gasiorowski, Pascal Kern, Bruno Stevens.
territoires II
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Oeuvres de Robert Adams, Roger Ackling, Christian Lebrat, Masafumi Maita, Pierre Mercier, Hans van den Ban, Holger Trülzsch, Keiichi Tahara, Laurent Joubert, John Hilliard, Lothar Baumgarten.
sculpture contemporaine espagnole / transfrontalières
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Oeuvres d'Emilio Martinez et de Ricardo Cotanda.
