Prix Marcel Duchamp 2017
On The Podium
27 Sep 2017 - 08 Jan 2018
Photo credit : © De gauche à droite et de base en haut : Maja Bajevic, © Jean-Baptiste Blom, Courtesy of the artist and Michel Rein, Paris-Brussels / Joana Hadjithomas Ee Khalil Joreige, D.R. / Charlotte Moth, © Magali Delporte, 2017 / Santoro Vittorio, Brooklyn, New York, mai 2011, Photo : George Go
PRIX MARCEL DUCHAMP 2017
On The Podium
27 September 2017 - 8 January 2018
Curator : Mnam/Cci, A.Knock
The four finalists of the Marcel Duchamp Prize are invited to show at the Centre Pompidou. For this, Maja Bajevic, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Charlotte Moth and Vittorio Santoro – all of whom already have works in the Centre Pompidou’s collections – have had to create new works. With this group show, the ADIAF and the Centre Pompidou offer the public a glimpse of today’s French art scene as they discover the work and explore the approaches of the individual artists. The show this year looks at the nature of the image, the poetics of the archive, and the hidden genealogy of both object and words.
Maja Bajevic
The melancholy air of the installation and the almost hypnotic sound in which we recognise only a few notes immerse us in a world of the past. As in a barely forgotten memory that escapes us at the very moment we think it is coming back. It is a desire cast into oblivion, a desire we do not or do not any longer desire. At the centre of the installation stands a laboratory shelf on which are arranged 32 bulbs of different kinds. These blink in Morse code, both mysterious and familiar, rehearsing texts connected with utopias forgotten or abjured. It seems to stand there as if it has been a long time abandoned and nature has taken over. The thinking behind it is much indebted to Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future. As Tanguy Wuilleme has said, “If late capitalism has already mortgaged the past, it does the same for the future, which it sterilises through progress and technological innovation. Faced with such a globalised future, in which everything lends itself to commoditisation and profit, in which everything seems to have been predicted, utopia can function to perturb the present.”
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
“Continuing our researches on the writing of history and the construction of imaginaries, the Discordances/Unconformities project makes use for its own ends of the sub-soil sampling technique known as core drilling. With the help of archaeologists, historians, geologists and graphic artists, and exploring different modes of visual representation, we have sought to tell certain stories about the world. What do we see of the traces of history buried beneath our feet, what of the catastrophes and ruptures? All is levelled, buried, covered over, and everything starts again. This is a recurrent cycle of destruction and reconstruction. We mix, we erase, we re-use the same stone, we destroy. From the detail of the micro to the overall view of the macro, we need these different scales,” say the two artists. In geology, an unconformity is a surface between different strata that marks a break in geological continuity, where sedimentary deposits, for example, have eroded before further sedimentation continued. And a discordance is an angular unconformity. History cannot be read as a process of regular, uniform sedimentation, but as a sequence of ruptures and torsions entailing the mixing together of traces, of ages and civilisations.
Charlotte Moth
“Different scenarios came to mind when I was trying to come up with something for the exhibition. I’ll be interested to see how we’re going to represent four (or even five!) different voices. For me, as someone who works on architecture and social space, the Centre Pompidou is an iconic museum. I was immediately tempted to do something with the polysemy of the place as a physical site and also as a conceptual framework,” says the artist. In her installation she pursues her reflection on sculpture and the relationship to space and light it inherits from modernism. Several sculptures from the collections of the City of Paris find a new life in a novel spatio-temporal narrative that offers, implicitly, another history of art: in the exhibition space, public sculpture becomes personal.
Vittorio Santoro
“The first time I saw the Centre Pompidou I was 16 and I didn’t know what it was,” reports Vittorio Santoro. “I had arrived at the Gare de l’Est on the night train. I was fascinated by the building. People with very different interests and intentions mixed, rested and lived their lives on the Piazza and in the Forum. Today, still, it is for me a space of unexpected encounters and diverse temporalities, a place you can immerse yourself in. This is the space my work occupies. For the Marcel Duchamp Prize I came up with an installation Une porte doit être ouverte ou non fermée that functions as a chronological journey, a procession and an initiatory rite. These pieces are sculpted moments constructed of familiar forms and subliminal paradoxes. This silent ritual leads viewers far from language to the place where the contradictions between thought and lived experience begin to make themselves felt: an open space. The installation also extends beyond the gallery space into Paris, to nine different points. I want the viewers’ experience to go beyond all boundaries, I want them to feel that moving about the work, whether inside or outside, engages them, that it’s not indifferent.”
On The Podium
27 September 2017 - 8 January 2018
Curator : Mnam/Cci, A.Knock
The four finalists of the Marcel Duchamp Prize are invited to show at the Centre Pompidou. For this, Maja Bajevic, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Charlotte Moth and Vittorio Santoro – all of whom already have works in the Centre Pompidou’s collections – have had to create new works. With this group show, the ADIAF and the Centre Pompidou offer the public a glimpse of today’s French art scene as they discover the work and explore the approaches of the individual artists. The show this year looks at the nature of the image, the poetics of the archive, and the hidden genealogy of both object and words.
Maja Bajevic
The melancholy air of the installation and the almost hypnotic sound in which we recognise only a few notes immerse us in a world of the past. As in a barely forgotten memory that escapes us at the very moment we think it is coming back. It is a desire cast into oblivion, a desire we do not or do not any longer desire. At the centre of the installation stands a laboratory shelf on which are arranged 32 bulbs of different kinds. These blink in Morse code, both mysterious and familiar, rehearsing texts connected with utopias forgotten or abjured. It seems to stand there as if it has been a long time abandoned and nature has taken over. The thinking behind it is much indebted to Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future. As Tanguy Wuilleme has said, “If late capitalism has already mortgaged the past, it does the same for the future, which it sterilises through progress and technological innovation. Faced with such a globalised future, in which everything lends itself to commoditisation and profit, in which everything seems to have been predicted, utopia can function to perturb the present.”
Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige
“Continuing our researches on the writing of history and the construction of imaginaries, the Discordances/Unconformities project makes use for its own ends of the sub-soil sampling technique known as core drilling. With the help of archaeologists, historians, geologists and graphic artists, and exploring different modes of visual representation, we have sought to tell certain stories about the world. What do we see of the traces of history buried beneath our feet, what of the catastrophes and ruptures? All is levelled, buried, covered over, and everything starts again. This is a recurrent cycle of destruction and reconstruction. We mix, we erase, we re-use the same stone, we destroy. From the detail of the micro to the overall view of the macro, we need these different scales,” say the two artists. In geology, an unconformity is a surface between different strata that marks a break in geological continuity, where sedimentary deposits, for example, have eroded before further sedimentation continued. And a discordance is an angular unconformity. History cannot be read as a process of regular, uniform sedimentation, but as a sequence of ruptures and torsions entailing the mixing together of traces, of ages and civilisations.
Charlotte Moth
“Different scenarios came to mind when I was trying to come up with something for the exhibition. I’ll be interested to see how we’re going to represent four (or even five!) different voices. For me, as someone who works on architecture and social space, the Centre Pompidou is an iconic museum. I was immediately tempted to do something with the polysemy of the place as a physical site and also as a conceptual framework,” says the artist. In her installation she pursues her reflection on sculpture and the relationship to space and light it inherits from modernism. Several sculptures from the collections of the City of Paris find a new life in a novel spatio-temporal narrative that offers, implicitly, another history of art: in the exhibition space, public sculpture becomes personal.
Vittorio Santoro
“The first time I saw the Centre Pompidou I was 16 and I didn’t know what it was,” reports Vittorio Santoro. “I had arrived at the Gare de l’Est on the night train. I was fascinated by the building. People with very different interests and intentions mixed, rested and lived their lives on the Piazza and in the Forum. Today, still, it is for me a space of unexpected encounters and diverse temporalities, a place you can immerse yourself in. This is the space my work occupies. For the Marcel Duchamp Prize I came up with an installation Une porte doit être ouverte ou non fermée that functions as a chronological journey, a procession and an initiatory rite. These pieces are sculpted moments constructed of familiar forms and subliminal paradoxes. This silent ritual leads viewers far from language to the place where the contradictions between thought and lived experience begin to make themselves felt: an open space. The installation also extends beyond the gallery space into Paris, to nine different points. I want the viewers’ experience to go beyond all boundaries, I want them to feel that moving about the work, whether inside or outside, engages them, that it’s not indifferent.”