Future, Former, Fugitive
A French scene
16 Oct 2019 - 05 Jan 2020
FUTURE, FORMER, FUGITIVE
A French scene
16 October 2019 - 5 January 2020
Curators: Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc, Claire Moulène
Curatorial assistant: Marilou Thiébault
The exhibition Future, Former, Fugitive, devoted to “a French scene” is based on an open conception of territorial placement – bringing together artists born in France and abroad, living in France or elsewhere, linked provisionally or lastingly to this country – in particular it escapes from the effects of a tabula rasa dictating that one generation eclipses another. On the contrary, it unites “contemporaries” who today share this evolving space with its porous frontiers. Meanwhile, it seeks to sketch out the routes of transmission through which this mood of the times is conveyed and which is a breath of fresh air simultaneously for the forty-four artists or groups that have here been united. They are artists born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work in and within their era.
Contemporary is a “transitive word and thus relational”, Lionel Ruffel reminds us in Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain. We are contemporary with something or with someone and it is this interdependency or bond, that allows us to establish a bridge from one artist to another in the exhibition which we have put together in all of the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. It is once more this permeability to the present and a form of permanence in time which we seemed to notice in the artists in the exhibition and which allowed us to draw up this unexhaustive, but quite simply sensitive, snap of a French scene. Or, rather, of “another” French scene. The one that is being created more discreetly, but no less powerfully, in studios, art schools, shared spaces, on the margins or sheltered from the market.
The guest artists thus share forms of resistance to assignations and other fashion effects which tinge deeply an era. But these artists do not isolate themselves from today’s world. On the contrary, it might be said that by refusing immediacy, they allow the density of time to infiltrate their works. “The ones that call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity” as Giorgio Agamben wrote a few years ago, while also bringing up the highly effective notion of “unactuality” which could fit with the artists who are in action here.
This exhibition is thus an opportunity to bring to mind that there is not just one French scene, but rather a number of communities, engagements and singularities. During the months of preparation of the exhibition, we became surprised by the increasingly outstanding posture of some of the individualities on the vast and complex surface of the French landscape. With a still-lively curiosity for a return to the collective which can been felt today among a certain number of young artists, who are trying out a new way of living together, in shared spaces and forms de mutualisation as an answer to an economic need, we have little by little been moved to a need to reaffirm more singular trajectories. They are singular and not necessarily solitary, given that many of the artists in this exhibition keep up forms of companionship in the long term with peers, of every generation.
With: Nils Alix-Tabeling, Mali Arun ((Winner of the Grand Prix du Salon de Montrouge 2018), Fabienne Audéoud, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Grégoire Beil, Martin Belou, Jean-Luc Blanc, Maurice Blaussyld, Anne Bourse,Kévin Bray, Madison Bycroft, Julien Carreyn, Marc Camille Chaimowicz in collaboration with We Do Not Work Alone, Antoine Château, Nina Childress, Jean Claus, Jean-Alain Corre, Jonas Delaborde et Hendrik Hegray, Bertrand Dezoteux, Vidya Gastaldon, Corentin Grossmann, Agata Ingarden, Renaud Jerez, Pierre Joseph, Laura Lamiel, Anne Le Troter, Antoine Marquis, Caroline Mesquita, Anita Molinero, Aude Pariset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Marine Peixoto, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Antoine Renard, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Linda Sanchez (Winner of the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo 2018), Alain Séchas, Anna Solal, Kengné Téguia, Sarah Tritz, Nicolas Tubéry, Turpentine, Adrien Vescovi, Nayel Zeaiter.
These tales of genealogy underpin the exhibition. Little talked about or exhibited, they are still basic to all the artistic scenes who owe their lives to the multiplicity of viewpoints when it comes to affinities and a form of continuity. Among the forty-four artists or groups who have been brought together many met in art schools, which are par excellence places for intergenerational transmission. Alongside these places for fertile encounters, a large number of more informal spaces, on the margins of institutions, have been decisive for the artists in the exhibition. Because Future, Former, Fugitive is also particular in the sense of bringing together a large number of artists with atypical trajectories, which are non-linear or up-and-down, and who sometimes root themselves or thrive far from the world of art. As a sensitive and dynamic mapping of another French scene, this exhibition reaffirms the role of certain ferrymen or more secret and fleeting figures in every sense, but above all of artists who have set their work in a sort of duration, whether they be at the start of their careers or at the head of a deep body of work.
Finally, something should be said about the title which we have taken from the work of the same name by Olivier Cadiot. As an “experimental” writer, poet, playwright, and himself a ferryman of various artistic fields, he has placed experience, creation and a decisive take on time at the heart of his subtly unclassifiable writing. Futur, ancien, fugitif brought into his novels a figure who would become recurrent: Robinson. A “Robinson” far from the heroic character depicted by Daniel Defoe, and simply “just beside, on the edge, maybe just below” as Eric Mangion writes in the Palais magazine that accompanies this exhibition. Fleeing the grip of time, “fugitive” seems to us to be a good description for these forty-four witnesses of an ungraspable present.
A French scene
16 October 2019 - 5 January 2020
Curators: Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc, Claire Moulène
Curatorial assistant: Marilou Thiébault
The exhibition Future, Former, Fugitive, devoted to “a French scene” is based on an open conception of territorial placement – bringing together artists born in France and abroad, living in France or elsewhere, linked provisionally or lastingly to this country – in particular it escapes from the effects of a tabula rasa dictating that one generation eclipses another. On the contrary, it unites “contemporaries” who today share this evolving space with its porous frontiers. Meanwhile, it seeks to sketch out the routes of transmission through which this mood of the times is conveyed and which is a breath of fresh air simultaneously for the forty-four artists or groups that have here been united. They are artists born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work in and within their era.
Contemporary is a “transitive word and thus relational”, Lionel Ruffel reminds us in Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain. We are contemporary with something or with someone and it is this interdependency or bond, that allows us to establish a bridge from one artist to another in the exhibition which we have put together in all of the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. It is once more this permeability to the present and a form of permanence in time which we seemed to notice in the artists in the exhibition and which allowed us to draw up this unexhaustive, but quite simply sensitive, snap of a French scene. Or, rather, of “another” French scene. The one that is being created more discreetly, but no less powerfully, in studios, art schools, shared spaces, on the margins or sheltered from the market.
The guest artists thus share forms of resistance to assignations and other fashion effects which tinge deeply an era. But these artists do not isolate themselves from today’s world. On the contrary, it might be said that by refusing immediacy, they allow the density of time to infiltrate their works. “The ones that call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity” as Giorgio Agamben wrote a few years ago, while also bringing up the highly effective notion of “unactuality” which could fit with the artists who are in action here.
This exhibition is thus an opportunity to bring to mind that there is not just one French scene, but rather a number of communities, engagements and singularities. During the months of preparation of the exhibition, we became surprised by the increasingly outstanding posture of some of the individualities on the vast and complex surface of the French landscape. With a still-lively curiosity for a return to the collective which can been felt today among a certain number of young artists, who are trying out a new way of living together, in shared spaces and forms de mutualisation as an answer to an economic need, we have little by little been moved to a need to reaffirm more singular trajectories. They are singular and not necessarily solitary, given that many of the artists in this exhibition keep up forms of companionship in the long term with peers, of every generation.
With: Nils Alix-Tabeling, Mali Arun ((Winner of the Grand Prix du Salon de Montrouge 2018), Fabienne Audéoud, Carlotta Bailly-Borg, Grégoire Beil, Martin Belou, Jean-Luc Blanc, Maurice Blaussyld, Anne Bourse,Kévin Bray, Madison Bycroft, Julien Carreyn, Marc Camille Chaimowicz in collaboration with We Do Not Work Alone, Antoine Château, Nina Childress, Jean Claus, Jean-Alain Corre, Jonas Delaborde et Hendrik Hegray, Bertrand Dezoteux, Vidya Gastaldon, Corentin Grossmann, Agata Ingarden, Renaud Jerez, Pierre Joseph, Laura Lamiel, Anne Le Troter, Antoine Marquis, Caroline Mesquita, Anita Molinero, Aude Pariset, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Marine Peixoto, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Antoine Renard, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Linda Sanchez (Winner of the Prix des Amis du Palais de Tokyo 2018), Alain Séchas, Anna Solal, Kengné Téguia, Sarah Tritz, Nicolas Tubéry, Turpentine, Adrien Vescovi, Nayel Zeaiter.
These tales of genealogy underpin the exhibition. Little talked about or exhibited, they are still basic to all the artistic scenes who owe their lives to the multiplicity of viewpoints when it comes to affinities and a form of continuity. Among the forty-four artists or groups who have been brought together many met in art schools, which are par excellence places for intergenerational transmission. Alongside these places for fertile encounters, a large number of more informal spaces, on the margins of institutions, have been decisive for the artists in the exhibition. Because Future, Former, Fugitive is also particular in the sense of bringing together a large number of artists with atypical trajectories, which are non-linear or up-and-down, and who sometimes root themselves or thrive far from the world of art. As a sensitive and dynamic mapping of another French scene, this exhibition reaffirms the role of certain ferrymen or more secret and fleeting figures in every sense, but above all of artists who have set their work in a sort of duration, whether they be at the start of their careers or at the head of a deep body of work.
Finally, something should be said about the title which we have taken from the work of the same name by Olivier Cadiot. As an “experimental” writer, poet, playwright, and himself a ferryman of various artistic fields, he has placed experience, creation and a decisive take on time at the heart of his subtly unclassifiable writing. Futur, ancien, fugitif brought into his novels a figure who would become recurrent: Robinson. A “Robinson” far from the heroic character depicted by Daniel Defoe, and simply “just beside, on the edge, maybe just below” as Eric Mangion writes in the Palais magazine that accompanies this exhibition. Fleeing the grip of time, “fugitive” seems to us to be a good description for these forty-four witnesses of an ungraspable present.