he first public artworks in the Jardin des Tuileries were placed there by Louis XV in the 18th century and, following the French Revolution, more were transferred from royal estates. Today, the gardens are a veritable outdoor museum for sculptures from the 17th to 21st centuries.
I was visited again yesterday. The end of work had given me back to the world. I sat on a bench shaded by a large red palm tree, watching the nightfall. The ravine on the edge of which I sat held a fragrant rut, soaked with dead leaves and spoiled fruit. This natural repository had mixed the stench of several fallen lychee decomposed down to their oily entrails with the scents of macerated herbs. The hour came when the fading daylight shot its gilded rays on the surrounding pediments and sometimes also on a piece of exposed sheet metal or on a strip of cornice. I knew that for the next hour or two my skin would take on that sandy tint, while a small tribe of mosquitos drank themselves sick on blood like sour milk enclosed within my own veins.
The inaugural Parisian edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair took place at Christie’s headquarters in the 8th arrondissement from January 20th to 23rd (an online version, on Artsy, continues through the 31st). It was the first time since its founding in 2013 that the fair had come to the French capital, a decision that was made following the postponement of its annual February edition in Marrakech.
In the second volume of his Prison Notebooks (1926), Italian communist Antonio Gramsci suggests that critical consciousness stems from the understanding that one’s identity is shaped by historical processes ‘which [have] deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.’ The notion of an infinitely mutable mosaic of identities that we carry with ourselves (class, gender and race) is at the heart of ‘Visionary Company’, the exhibition by filmmaker and performance artist Wu Tsang and her multidisciplinary collective Moved by Motion, currently at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris.
Si le street art nous paraît aujourd’hui lié à une certaine modernité urbaine, ses origines remontent en réalité à l’art néolithique, comme nous le rappelle une photographie de la main en négatif sur le mur de la grotte Chauvet-Pont d’Arc. Cette photo ne représente qu’un des aspects du portrait que Christian Guémy, alias C215, dresse du pochoir. Son Manuel du pochoir retrace l’histoire de cet art, sans doute l’outil le plus utilisé dans la réalisation d’une œuvre de street art, après la bombe de peinture. Dans cette histoire originelle se mêlent l’expérience personnelle et un grand savoir-faire technique qui découle d’une vie passée à peindre les murs du monde entier. Mais la biographie de C215 n’est que suggérée ici et là par le Manuel, qui se concentre plutôt sur des explications synthétiques mais complètes de la multitude d’aspects propres à la peinture au pochoir. Loin d’être un outil simplifiant la peinture jusqu’à la transformer en geste mécanique, il s’agit d’un instrument qui démultiplie les possibilités du rendu de l’image. L’ouvrage évoque les liens entre la peinture au pochoir et d’autres techniques artistiques à l’instar de l’estampe et la photographie. Afin d’exposer pleinement la multiplicité d’usages que cette méthode, l’ouvrage insère des entretiens avec 17 différents street artistes. Au total, il reste accessible tout en étant didactique.
Le ministre de l’Intérieur a obtenu le retrait d’une œuvre d’art qui dénonçait la dangerosité de la reconnaissance faciale lors d’une exposition. Avec la reconnaissance du syndicat de policiers Synergie-Officiers
Independent Turkish art critic and curator Beral Madra’s résumé is long and impressive. She coordinated the first two Istanbul Biennales in 1987 and 1989, was the curator of the Turkish pavilion in the 43rd, 45th, 49th, 50th and 51st Venice Biennales, co-curated the exhibition Modernities and Memories: Recent Works from the Islamic World in 47th Venice Biennale, and that is just the first page. She has curated over 250 group and solo shows of international artists and is the author of several books, including Post-peripheral Flux: A Decade of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (Literatür Yayınevi, Istanbul, 1996) and Home Affairs: Ten articles published in Radikal 2000-2009 (BM CAC Publications, Istanbul, 2009). She is also the director of the Beral Madra Contemporary Art Center (BM CAC), an archive and library open to research and academic work.
At 28-years-of-age, Cédric Fauq is the Palais de Tokyo’s newest and youngest curator. One of two new staff appointments by the Parisian contemporary art center’s new director Emma Lavigne, Fauq distinguished himself with a short but illustrious tenure at Nottingham Contemporary, as cofounder of the independent London space clearview.ltd and as co-curator of the Baltic Triennial 13.
The seventh edition of Paris Gallery Weekend took place this past weekend, a month and a half later than in previous years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Sixty participating galleries presenting 72 exhibitions are spread across four neighborhoods or, one could say, three temporalities. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Marais, the 8th arrondissement, and Pantin-Romainville symbolically represent the past, present, and future of the Parisian art market.
Le mobilier national, un service du ministère de la Culture, a annoncé jeudi une vente aux enchères exceptionnelle de meubles de sa collection afin de « contribuer à l’effort de la Nation pour soutenir les hôpitaux ». Il s’agit d’une partie de ses collections qui sera cédée lors des Journées du Patrimoine, les 20 et 21 septembre, dont tous les bénéfices seront reversés à la Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris-Hôpitaux de France, présidée par Brigitte Macron.
L’art dit « socialiste » est pour beaucoup synonyme de propagande, sans réel intérêt esthétique. L’exposition Affiches cubaines, révolution et cinéma, 1959-2019 au Musée d’arts décoratifs (MAD) à Paris, en présente au contraire un tout autre genre : coloré, exubérant et surtout ouvert à diverses influences provenant de l’art contemporain mondial, telles le pop, le psychédélisme ou l’art optique (op’ art) et cinétique.
The six short films, two photographs and a sculptural installation in Luiz Roque’s solo show at Passerelle – Centre d’art contemporain offer a snapshot of the artist’s 20-year career. Eschewing strict chronological order, the works in ‘República’ speak to the artist’s persistent engagement with both global and local issues through his weaving of gender, race, class politics, ecology, modernism and science fiction into sensuous fragmentary, filmic narratives.
ISTANBUL—Sur ce qui paraît être une chaîne d’information en continu, nous voyons l’arrivée d’un cortège officiel d’automobiles à l’entrée d’un palais présidentiel. La porte de l’une des limousines noires s’ouvre et en émerge un sac-poubelle, de la taille d’un homme. Le sac-poubelle et le Président s’étreignent avant d’entrer dans le palais. Dans la prochaine scène, les deux apparaissent derrière deux pupitres identiques lors d’une conférence de presse où les flashes des caméras les illuminent et les journalistes vocifèrent pour leur poser des questions. Ensuite, nous voyons le sac-poubelle s’adresser aux Nations Unies, avant que la caméra ne passe enfin sur une masse de plastique, de la taille d’un continent, flottant dans l’océan.
L’été voit les possibilités d’hébergements militants se réduire et des familles se retrouvent à la rue. Sans-papier, demandeurs d’asile ou même naturalisés, ils sont les premières victimes des carences de l’état en matière de logement.
Europe is in crisis. Right-wing populisms are on the rise and have been for some time now. As the European Union’s once triumphant liberal hegemony sputters under the weight of its own contradictions, politicians such as Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini have seized on a generalized feeling of precariousness to address a more libidinal obsession with national identity, defined in opposition to the non-European other.
‘I have dreamed geometry / I have dreamed the point, the line, the plane, and the volume / I have dreamed yellow, blue and red.’ These lines from Jorge Luis Borges’s poem ‘Descartes’ (1981) are found on the opening page of the catalogue to ‘Géométries sud, du Mexique à la Terre de feu’ (Southern Geometries, from Mexico to the Tierra del Fuego). A fitting epigraph, they announce the vertiginous profusion of coloured shapes in the nearly 250 works by more than 70 artists and creators from the pre-Columbian period to the present.
The first work that the visitor encounters upon entering the exhibition is Opening with rain (2018), which looks, at first glance, like a large slab of stone. It's actually painted papier maché, with traces of colorful paint – blood-orange, fluorescent yellow and deep turquoise – set into recessed spaces that appear as zoomorphic hieroglyphs, describing something between insect and totem. These markings radiate out from a stone egg suspended within a crater in the lower half of the composition.
It is more than a film but not exactly an exhibition. Not quite theatre or performance, although elements of both are omnipresent. It has Mongolian shamans, Russian orthodox priests, rabbis, imams and psychoanalysts, if you need to vent. There are meticulously detailed recreations of Soviet-era apartments inhabited by people who only speak Russian. Eminent performance artist Marina Abramović is supposed to make an appearance. (She is one of the project’s many celebrity ‘ambassadors’ who also include physicists and mathematicians Carlo Rovelli and Dimitri Kaledin, theatre directors Peter Sellars and Romeo Castellucci, artists Carsten Höller and Philippe Parreno and the designer Rei Kawakubo, among others.) And, for one euro, a stony-faced barman will serve you watery coffee or a litre of beer. It is DAU, the multimedia art ‘experience’-cum-independent Soviet state that is being hailed by its creators as the art-event of the century and by the French press as a disastrous flop.
For the fourth iteration of the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Carte Blanche’ series – where a single artist is invited to transform the entirety of the Paris museum’s cavernous 13,000 m2 exhibition space – Berlin-based Argentinian artist Tomás Saraceno has conceived a massive black and white parcours. His installations encourage visitors to reflect on their place within the infinitely complex networks that structure our existence, from the minutiae of dust particles and the vibrations of spiderwebs to the collisions of galaxies in the universe. In so doing, the exhibition, which is titled ‘On Air’, explicitly situates itself within the ecologically conscientious conversations around climate change and humanity’s changing relationship to nature in the age of the Anthropocene.
PARIS—La première chose que constate le visiteur de l’exposition Cooper Jacoby, Susceptibles sont les sculptures de couleurs vives—bleu ciel, orange et jaune fluorescents. Elles se dégagent de la blancheur aveuglante des salles de High Art, galerie située au rez-de-chaussée de l’immeuble où Georges Bizet a commencé à composer l’opéra Carmen. Entouré par des lambris blanchis du XIXe siècle, les œuvres de Cooper Jacoby, jeune artiste américain, font allusion aux espaces du quotidien, intérieurs et extérieurs, privés et publics.
