All tagged Film
Lili Reynaud-Dewar had to go to Scotland to learn about France. The artist, born in La Rochelle on the western coast of France in 1975, moved to the UK to study for a masters in fine art at the Glasgow School of Art in 2001. “I didn’t realise until then how male-dominated the French contemporary art word was. There were artists that I admired very much, but there was very little place for women,” she says.
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.
