Claire Fontaine
30 Jan - 21 Mar 2009
CLAIRE FONTAINE
Destroy and Rejuvenate
30th January - 21st March 2009
Regina Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Claire Fontaine in Moscow, Destroy and rejuvenate. Claire Fontaine is a collective artist based in Paris and founded in 2004. Through her practice she questions the political impotency and the crisis of singularity that seems to characterise contemporary life today, experimenting with protocols of collective production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Destroy and rejuvenate is a controversial quotation taken from the most ambiguous text by Walter Benjamin, The destructive character. In this text Benjamin affirms that the main virtue of the destructive character is to free space, to make room. Often associated to the concept of “positive barbarism”, the destruction that Benjamin evokes clears the mental collective space and generates a sort of revolutionary memory that helps mankind to go towards a freer and more emancipated future. The neon sign, Destroy and rejuvenate is a homage to Walter Benjamin and gives the title to the exhibition.
The two Passe-Partout sculptures relate directly to Moscow and refer to the two faces of this fascinating town, the extraordinary luxury and extreme poverty. The Passe-partout works are sets of home made lock-picks used to illegally enter locked doors; they are customized with trinkets that recall the identity of the town where the artist had some economical and affective transaction. Their sense is to provide a possible use value to the collector – by making him into a potential thief - and to create a zone of ambiguity between the market and theft.
AMERIKA is a neon sign written in the K. font, a font created by the artist and composed of fluorescent neon strip lights, the cheapest lighting system commonly used in schools, hospitals, factories, prisons and all sort of disciplinary places. The K. font was named after Kafka. In Kafka’s novel entitled, Amerika, the protagonist, Karl Rossmann, embodies the figure of the generous and altruistic young man that will be rejected by everyone and forced to emigrate towards an uncertain future in the most unwelcoming country in the world: Amerika..
AMERIKA is a monument to the immigrants that have faced long and difficult trips in order to have a richer life and who were left only with broken dreams and their solitude.
The series of paintings of anonymous hands are visual questions about the responsibility of people in their everyday actions. They postulate by their simplicity and poverty an equivalence between the actions that they display (voting, playing, breaking, paying) and serve as a figuration of the range of legal actions that our bodies can still perform in the public space.
Destroy and Rejuvenate
30th January - 21st March 2009
Regina Gallery is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of Claire Fontaine in Moscow, Destroy and rejuvenate. Claire Fontaine is a collective artist based in Paris and founded in 2004. Through her practice she questions the political impotency and the crisis of singularity that seems to characterise contemporary life today, experimenting with protocols of collective production, détournements, and the production of various devices for the sharing of intellectual and private property.
Destroy and rejuvenate is a controversial quotation taken from the most ambiguous text by Walter Benjamin, The destructive character. In this text Benjamin affirms that the main virtue of the destructive character is to free space, to make room. Often associated to the concept of “positive barbarism”, the destruction that Benjamin evokes clears the mental collective space and generates a sort of revolutionary memory that helps mankind to go towards a freer and more emancipated future. The neon sign, Destroy and rejuvenate is a homage to Walter Benjamin and gives the title to the exhibition.
The two Passe-Partout sculptures relate directly to Moscow and refer to the two faces of this fascinating town, the extraordinary luxury and extreme poverty. The Passe-partout works are sets of home made lock-picks used to illegally enter locked doors; they are customized with trinkets that recall the identity of the town where the artist had some economical and affective transaction. Their sense is to provide a possible use value to the collector – by making him into a potential thief - and to create a zone of ambiguity between the market and theft.
AMERIKA is a neon sign written in the K. font, a font created by the artist and composed of fluorescent neon strip lights, the cheapest lighting system commonly used in schools, hospitals, factories, prisons and all sort of disciplinary places. The K. font was named after Kafka. In Kafka’s novel entitled, Amerika, the protagonist, Karl Rossmann, embodies the figure of the generous and altruistic young man that will be rejected by everyone and forced to emigrate towards an uncertain future in the most unwelcoming country in the world: Amerika..
AMERIKA is a monument to the immigrants that have faced long and difficult trips in order to have a richer life and who were left only with broken dreams and their solitude.
The series of paintings of anonymous hands are visual questions about the responsibility of people in their everyday actions. They postulate by their simplicity and poverty an equivalence between the actions that they display (voting, playing, breaking, paying) and serve as a figuration of the range of legal actions that our bodies can still perform in the public space.