The flagship exhibition HETEROTOPIA, curated by the organizers of the Biennale, brings together sixteen French and international artists at the Espace 24 Beaubourg.
Photographers or visual artists, the artists presented highlight distorted, deconstructed, reconstructed or falsified images, and are carriers of innovative photographic ideas both on the subjects addressed and the methods used.
Opening on November 01 from 18 p.m. to 22 p.m.
Tadao Cern / Amir Chasson / Cyriak / Frederique Daubal / Nicolas Deville /
Sandrine De Pas / Anne de Vries / Lingfei Guan / Rachel De Joode / Philippe Katerine /
Manon Pretto / Marie Serruya / Roman Signer / Oli Sorenson / Letha Wilson / Erwin Wurm.
Round tables / talks on Saturday 04 and Sunday 12 Nov at 15 p.m.
Duration:
From Tuesday to Sunday
from 13AM to 20PM
Address
24 Beaubourg
24, rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
Metro: Rambuteau
Post-opening evening
November 01 from 22 p.m. to 02 a.m.
Live concert of Cherry Sunkist Aka Karin Fisslthaler, Vienna.
Electro mix.
Upon reservation.
RSVP: rsvp@bit20.paris
NIGHT GALLERY,
7 rue d'Aix, 75010 Paris
Metro: Goncourt
HETEROTOPIA
For the 2023 Flagship Exhibition of the third edition of the Biennale de l'Image Tangible, we will let ourselves be carried away by the wind of lightness, absurdity and derision. As an antidote to the dark prophecies that overwhelm us, we will savor the impertinence of those who do not see everything black. Of those who know how to bend reality and transport us with their fantasy beyond contemporary anxieties. But far from any discourse and any morality, this artistic posture underlines the state of despair of our societies and the need to combat it with discernment.
And we need it. With the end of ideologies and the absence of any positive perspective, the imagination of our time has suddenly darkened to the point of projecting itself into dark futures and counter-utopian universes. Not that there are no other reasons to fuel this darkness, including the climate crisis, wars and the recent epidemic, but pessimism has taken hold in people's minds for a long time. In this context, many artists have refocused on formal research often driven by the considerable scope offered by new technologies. Others document and act out the catastrophe to come, but the absence of solutions and the withdrawal into oneself generally characterize our time. Exit then the revolution and its untenable promises, for as much must we be satisfied with reasonable or punctual solutions to re-enchant the future? Should we believe in technological promises to save the world or adopt them precisely to never question ourselves?
The artists in this flagship exhibition do not pose the problem in these terms, and if their works sometimes seem disconnected from current issues, they nonetheless address issues of gender, identity, sexuality, consumption and more generally. of our own place in the world in the metaphysical sense of the term. Of great formal diversity, the form covers several registers, editing, installation, staging, photographic objects and involves multiple techniques.
When the works of Erwin Würm, Frédérique Daubal or Roman Signer compete in imagination in a wacky register, Tadao Cern prefers to take samples from the field and testify like a reporter. The installations of Sandrine de Pas, the cut-outs of Amir Chasson or the portraits of Nicolas Deville form a heterogeneous and coherent corpus of provocative and disturbing images. Rachel Joode, Anne De Vries, Letha Wilson have fun deconstructing our perception of space, both physical and mental, while Manon Pretto, Oli Serenson, Marie Serruya invest in technology to develop universes where the assumed artificiality of their pieces acts as a distorting mirror of reality. Lingfei Guan's work explores Asian fetishism and eroticism with cynicism and a clever touch of kitsch. Philippe Katerine, known for his musical or cinematographic performances, puts a foot into the tangible by exhibiting part of his latest plastic project Mignonism.
If the sum of all these views forms a whole, it is because it stands out in several points from current trends. By the human presence in the works but also by the subtle commitment that humor and casualness allow. Going against the grain, this corpus is part of the concept of Heterotopia dear to Michel Foucault[1]. And this exhibition effectively offers an autonomous space, far from trends, dominant thinking and standardized perceptions. A space of decompression where utopias and dystopias become a little more tangible.
In an ever more catastrophic topicality, the offbeat point of view of these artists dares to introduce the joker spirit that inhabits them. Without any particular ambition to remedy our ideological failures, their work challenges us and encourages us to take serious things more lightly. In the absence of any other message, will we be able to seize the pole, abandon any idea of seriousness since there is no solution?
It seems that a new air can finally blow on a world which does not stop dying. If humor is the politeness of despair, it can also overturn the table of all academicism. The urgency today is to put energy back at the center and even more to shake up the codes of a pessimistic and formatted era.
Born in 1983 in Vilnius. Lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Photo documentary of sleeping sunbathers – “Comfort Zone”, 2013
With this series, Lithuanian photographer Tadao Cern (b. 1983) has documented the beach as a place where the dominant concept of beauty and the otherwise fiercely guarded sense of privacy are both irrelevant. Unlike other areas of public space, which are subject to constant social scrutiny, it seems that all of these factors and norms are rejected when one is at the beach. The sleepy bathers, initially photographed unwittingly, have constructed an airtight microcosm on their colorful beach towels that makes their physical presence unassailable. The range of beachwear and selected accessories, the contortions of the sleepers' bodies, as well as the differences in their physical appearances come together like still lifes causing an aesthetic elevation of the beach and its temporary inhabitants. The mundane and the unique, the ordinary and the artistic, the sublime and the comic (involuntary) merge into a fascinating diagram of human lifestyles and variety.
Born in 1968 in Israel.
Lives and works in Berlin.
One of the fundamental ways pornography changed the world was the vicarious access it gave us to strangers, as illustrated in the source material I use to create these digital collages. Collage has the power to free any source material from its given context and give it new meaning and psychological intensity. Here, in the case of his collage work, by abruptly cutting, moving, rotating, repeating or mirroring pieces of the found images, the viewer is encouraged to reimagine a new narrative beyond the utilitarian porn consumption. The idea here is to weaponize these found footage in order to reawaken both the original, unsuspecting and “virginal” source material, as well as the viewers who casually examine it on instagram or as part of an exhibition. It's about giving these so-called "viewers" a chance to contemplate the much-discussed - but never enough - universal theme of victimization and loss of body ownership, not only in these discolored random samples of human lives (pre-AIDS gay male porn models), but also in their own contemporary secret and private lives. Some of these collages were included in his recent self-published collection of poems “Loose Holes” which was recently (September 2022) featured in an exhibition in Bratislava, around the same time that, across from the gallery, a young man 19-year-old murdered two men outside a gay bar, before shooting himself. Slovak police said the attack was "motivated by hatred of sexual minorities".
Born in 1974 in Brighton.
Lives and works in the middle of nowhere.
A regular contributor to the B3ta website since 2004, Cyriak shows a surreal and psychedelic style of animation. It uses the principle of anthropomorphism. Using fractal geometry patterns and order of magnitude variations, often with a quintessentially English image. Many of his animations use the faces of celebrities, elements of TV shows and his home town of Brighton. Cyriak's work features animals (cats, cows, sheep, etc.) among other themes.
Born in 1972 in Toulouse.
Lives and works in Paris.
Trained as a graphic designer, Frédérique Daubal likes to shake up the codes of representation. His conceptual works are humanized with humor and irony and are often brought to life through craft or recycling techniques. The multiple mediums and materials refer to everyday life and the fantasy that can be found there.
She wonders about transformation and questions the images of faces. In response to the many photographic portraits she takes or fashion photography she finds, Daubal extroverts the initial nature to pour into the morphism to the point of the absurd. Combining techniques, staging, analog and digital, she transfigures this mass of printed and painstakingly collected images into new photographic images.
She makes us feel what truly animates her: a spontaneous appropriation of the worlds that surround her, here with the faces, the eyes, the cheeks, the colors, the cutouts... Deformation, contrast, imperfection, through her expressive violence , Daubal's art evokes a primitivist critique.
Born in 1981 in Paris.
Lives and works in Paris.
Nicolas Deville after studying sound engineering, he held various positions in marketing, communication and events.
Video editor and independent production manager since 2021, he is simultaneously developing a series of portraits mainly in black and white, edited from various photos and often mixing humans and animals.
A little over 130 portraits made to date, with a second degree form, between grotesque and monstrous.
Born in 1981 in Montreal.
Lives and works in Digne les Bains.
Undoubtedly political, mixing humor and seriousness, "I have easy desire" proposes to approach the subject of erotic intimacy in photography through a series of "sexual portraits". Both documentary and staged, in the wake of XNUMXth and XNUMXst century artists who faced censorship from distributors (gallery owners, agents, curators) preferring to give pride of place to images of women, this project updates the issues of gaze, of sex and gender in the process of creating and disseminating sexualized images. By combining photographs taken from around twenty sessions with models, with various texts from readings and interviews, the project is part of a visual sociology approach. If “the sexual image” is a constructed image, as Paul Ardenne writes, [that] it only becomes “sexual” when it organizes itself according to rigorous parameters, all of which have a function of arousing, then of 'activate desire', what parameters can we jostle, shift, to highlight the social construction of sexual inequalities? The exhibition project, conceived as a domestic space, is intended to be an exploratory place using the codes of interior decoration while thwarting gender stereotypes. Inspired by the work of Sophie Calle, working on the intimacy exposed by associating photography and texts, the proposal is inscribed here by the choice to print the photographs on a variety of supports and materials, tending to reveal through humor the question of the everydayness of erotic images. But also to twist, to deform, to touch, to complete, to look down on or in transparency, the photographed bodies. What happens when photography becomes an everyday object? In which intimate spaces, on which surfaces can we (still) perform an act of subversion?
Born in 1977 in The Hague (Netherlands).
Lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin.
Anne de Vries is a Dutch artist who has worked since 2003 at the border between digital photography and other media, such as video and sculpture. De Vries is interested in how our understanding of reality is influenced by new media. He reconnects paradoxical elements, including different types of materials, to construct his works, often assessing how matter and information constantly influence each other.
In recent years, he has participated in the group exhibitions “Photographicness” (2015) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis (USA), “Folklore Contemporain” (2014), at the SWG3 Gallery in Glasgow and “Still/Life” ( 2013) at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow. He recently presented his solo work at the Martin von Zomeren gallery (Amsterdam) with the exhibition “The Oil We Eat” (2014).
Anne de Vries is represented by the Martin von Zomeren gallery in Amsterdam.
Born in 1998 in China.
Lives and works in London.
Online social media uses the exquisite commodities of consumerism to conceal the “reproduction of desire” that exploits the purpose of desire itself, constructing the image of the petty bourgeoisie's big other. In this project, I began by analyzing viewers' interaction with media and their visual psychology, and discovered that the capital fantasies brought about by commodity symbols and erotic associations acting on their bodies hold them in a cycle of satisfying and unsatisfying desires. In the form of the work, I use the video installation to show that representation in the media is a manifestation of the act of ego dissolution and the ideological coercion of the erotic economy on the individual. through the mechanism of erotic symbolism.
Born in 1979 in the Netherlands.
Lives and works in Berlin.
Rachel de Joode's work revolves around the tension between the flat surface of the pixelated screen and the tangible surface of the porous body. While many of his photographs take on the appearance of human skin or organic matter, on closer inspection our eye eventually recognizes material effects in these images made using elementary plastic art materials such as than clay or pigments, which bear the trace of the artist's hand. There exists in Rachel de Joode's work an oscillation between the two-dimensional surface and its three-dimensional corporeality. They belong to the haptic space in which we experience touch through the gaze. This sensory confusion also applies to the artist's approach to his medium. Indeed, Rachel de Joode uses photography as a mediation tool to express her physical experience of matter. It is also a way for her to shape these materials according to her desire. Thus, his sprites have power; they become subjects. They behave like other mediums, blurring boundaries. This performance of the art object extends to the context of the exhibition itself and to Rachel de Joode's role as artist-protagonist.
Alex Klein.
Born December 8, 1968 in Thouars (France).
Lives and works in Paris.
Philippe Blanchard, known as Philippe Katerine, is a French singer-songwriter, actor, director, cartoonist and writer.
At the beginning of his career, his style was sometimes assimilated to the easy-listening movement, offering music with bossa nova accents accompanied by often morbid or anguished texts and tinged with humour, the whole sometimes interspersed with audio collages. He also turned to rock, flirting with electronic music without ever ceasing to be part of offbeat French songs. In 2006, the title Louxor, j'adore taken from the album Robots après tout was a popular success which made it known to the general public, who retained the heady gimmick: “And I cut the sound…, and I put the sound back on! »
In 2010, he stood out as an actor by lending his features to Boris Vian in the biography Gainsbourg, heroic life of Joann Sfar. The following year, he headlined an offbeat comedy Je suis un no man's land by Thierry Jousse. In 2015, he reiterated by playing a head of state in Gaz de France by Benoît Forgeard.
At the same time, it stands out above all as an offbeat supporting role in French comedies: The Infernal Control Tower by Éric Judor (2016); Owl by Ramzy Bedia (2016); What is this family?! by Gabriel Julien-Laferriere (2016); Little Spirou by Nicolas Bary; Le Grand Bain by Gilles Lellouche (2018) or Le monde est à toi by Romain Gavras (2018).
During the César 2019, he received the César for best actor in a supporting role for his performance in Le Grand Bain, and, during the Victoires de la Musique 2020, he was crowned male artist of the year.
Born in 1993 in Clermont-Ferrand.
Lives and trails between Clermont-Ferrand and Paris.
Data swoosh, Installation, 2022
“Ghost data roams in dark corners of the internet, floating like ethereal specters in a virtual world. They are lost souls, fragments of ourselves that have been captured by technology and which continue to exist for a long time after we have left the physical world.
These ghosts are not scary, but rather fascinating, with their intangible appearance and their ability to blend into the digital environment.
They wander aimlessly, leaving behind traces of their passage in the form of data, files, messages, photos and videos.
Ghost data can be found everywhere, in social networks, file sharing sites, online forums and even in our own devices electronics. They are silent witnesses of our digital life, observing and recording everything we do.
But these ghosts aren't just remnants of our digital past, they are also a harbinger of our future."
Text written by ChatGPT
Born in 1991 in France.
Lives and works between Paris and Las Vegas.
Project All funds are allowed.
Chromavid is a lowtech experience developed by artist Marie Serruya during the confinement of the covid19 epidemic, inspired by the face of American singer Casey Abrams. The artist testifies, by a DIY installation of a film studio, behind the scenes on a green background, exposed with physical elements awaiting the activation of a visitor.
The Chromavid application can be activated with a QR code which allows you to change the decor as you wish and to travel without moving.
The project echoes the techniques of social media influencers, whose notoriety during periods of confinement exceeded normal in all countries of the world.
Born in 1938 in Appenzell (Switzerland).
Lives and works in St. Gallen (Switzerland).
Mainly known for his “Actions” and regularly labeled as a pyrotechnician artist or an “explosion artist”, Signer nevertheless refuses to allow himself to be circumscribed by the abundant literature and comments gravitating around his work. The very format he invented encompasses indiscriminately performance, sculpture, drawing, installation, photography and video.
It is about revealing or even suspending the creative process in order to structure time, to draw the eye to the barely visible. Signer thus strives to reproduce this magical moment, which has become almost ritual in his work: the one where the furtive transformation of form and material is made possible. He combines the simplicity of gestures or objects with the complexity of technical devices and physical phenomena that he triggers without wanting to control them. Exercising a physical or auratic presence, Signer finds himself in turn a trigger placed offscreen, a stuntman or a Sisyphean figure in his own universe.
His work is present in several public collections including: Museum Of Old And New Art (MONA), Tasmania; National Museum of Modern Art, Paris; FNAC, Paris-La Defense; Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK), Frankfurt/Main; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, St. Gallen; Kunsthaus, Zug; Kunsthaus, Zürich; MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles and in numerous FRAC, Fonds Régionaux d'Art Contemporain, including the FRAC Île-de-France/FR.
Born in 1969 in Los Angeles.
Lives and works in Montreal.
Oli Sorenson executes the suite of digital prints entitled Supply Chain as a continuation of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene Panorama series, colliding between several aesthetics: between the pixelated landscapes of Minecraft, the geometric paintings of Peter Halley, and a rotation at 45 degrees from the picture frame, a gesture popularized by the modern art of Piet Mondrian. Initially presented at the Elektra gallery in Montreal, the prints produced here are duplicated by NFT versions, present on the web3, reproduced and sold online under eco-responsible crypto-currency chains. The disorderly hanging of these works on the walls of the Tangible Image Biennale always challenges an ecological narrative at the heart of Sorenson's practice, to evoke both intensive agriculture and industrial factories, essential links in the chain of global supply that feeds the urban centers of our consumer societies.
Born in 1976 in Honolulu (Hawaii).
Lives and works in New York.
Letha Wilson is known for combining photography with industrial materials such as concrete and steel. Wilson cuts, tears and shapes his photographs, pushing and setting the prints in place, then encases parts of the composition in cement. She explores the magnetic pull of the American West, alluding to the intrinsic role of landscape in our own myths of reinvention, endless possibility, and inevitable promise. Using architecture and three-dimensionality as framework and armature, Wilson reclaims the photographic image, exploring the medium's inability to encompass the site it represents.
Born in 1954 in Bruck an der Mur (Austria).
Lives and works in Vienna.
Originally a sculptor, Erwin Wurm introduced the notion of time through photography.
“When I started working, what was traditionally meant by sculpture was a 3-dimensional thing that was meant to last forever. My feeling was that the sculpture could also last only a few moments. So I took pictures of those moments, and I consider those pictures to be sculptures as well.”
By using the human body – and in particular his own – as material, by using everyday objects, by making time an essential dimension of his photographic and video work, he questioned the foundations of sculpture – How to create a sculpture that is neither frozen in time nor in space? Can a sculpture become an everyday object?
“One Minute sculpture” then becomes the generic title of his works: Erwin Wurm creates them by inviting a person to follow a simple protocol, for example by putting himself in a temporary situation with a piece of clothing or an object.
Erwin Wurm also questions in his sculptures, appearances and the reality they mask: the sense of possession and accumulation. He develops research on the creative process, based on the transformations of shapes and weight. He thus creates strange objects or characters made deformed, exaggeratedly bloated, on the verge of bursting.
From a text by Francis Moreeuw
Duration:
From Tuesday to Sunday
from 13AM to 20PM
Address
24 BEAUBOURG,
24, rue Beaubourg, 75003 Paris
Metro: Rambuteau