Opening Thursday 26 november 2009


Curator: Florence Derieux

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.

With support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, founded in 1772

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


Curator: Florence Derieux

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.

With Support from Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, Maison fondée en 1772

Opening Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Curator: Florence Derieux

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. Cities of Gold and Mirrors (2009), notamment, est le tout dernier film réalisé par Cyprien Gaillard. Tourné en 16mm au Mexique, à Quintana Roo dans la province du Yucanan, est composé de cinq scènes situées à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur de la ville de Cancun, qui fut fondé en 1970. Apparaissent des vacanciers américains, un hôtel, des dauphins nageant dans la piscine de cet hôtel, un membre d’un gang de Los Angeles, les Bloods, dansant sur les ruines d’un site archéologique Maya appelé El Rey, la façade en miroir d’un immeuble en train d’être démoli et l’intérieur d’une immense boîte de nuit… La musique, intitulée « Le feu de Saint Elme » et composée par Haïm Saban et Shuki Levy, provient d’un célèbre dessin animé franco-japonais conçu en 1982, Les mystérieuses cités d’or. Le personnage principal de cette série, Esteban, qui à chaque épisode était sur le point de découvrir une nouvelle merveille, représente, selon l’artiste, le premier contact que les enfants français de sa génération ont eu avec les cultures précolombiennes. Le souvenir de ce dessin animé, réalisé dans un but éducatif mais débouchant constamment vers la science-fiction, a beaucoup marqué l’artiste. Le film constitue un portrait d’un moment historique particulier, le notre. 

Sans titre (2009) est la première peinture murale jamais réalisée par Cyprien Gaillard. L’artiste s’est inspiré du relevé sommaire réalisé par Jacques Cellier en 1585 du tracé du labyrinthe de la cathédrale de Reims qui fut détruit en 1779. Ce motif graphique est devenu le logotype des Monuments nationaux. Aujourd’hui, le dessin du labyrinthe, sorte de relevé topographique, incarne ainsi l’idée même de patrimoine et de monument chères à l’artiste, qui semble également faire référence, avec humour, à l’histoire de la peinture géométrique. 

Enfin, les Geographical Analogies font l’objet d’un important livre d’artiste coédité par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, la Kunsthalle Fridericianum de Cassel, la Hayward Gallery de Londres et le Musée d’art contemporain de Castilla y León à paraitre en 2009. Pour ce projet, Cyprien Gaillard a reçu l’Aide au premier catalogue du Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP).

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.