Matti Braun
dal 10/12/2010 al 11/2/2011
Segnalato da
10/12/2010
Matti Braun
La Galerie - Contemporary Art Centre, Noisy-le-Sec
Salo. In Braun's oeuvre, perspectives are shifted and opened up, facts reassembled and combined to generate equivocal meanings. Braun's works range from smaller objects that in part suggest folk pieces - ceramics, batiks, or mouth-blown glass objects - to photography and space-consuming installations.
Guest curator: Hilke Wagner, director of the Kunstverein Braunschweig
On the opening night, a free shuttle will leave Paris (Place de la République/metro République/exit
Rue du Temple) at 6:30 pm. Estimated return time 9:30 pm. No advance booking; seating subject to
availability.
As part of Thermostat, a cooperative project involving 24 French centres d’art and German
Kunstvereine, the Kunstverein Braunschweig is presenting a solo exhibition of Matti Braun
(1968, lives in Cologne) at La Galerie. For his first solo exhibition in France, Matti Braun will
present several groups of works inspired by cultural relationships between France, Germany,
Senegal and Morocco from the colonial period up to the present.
The exhibition represents a new step in the research that Matti Braun began in 2009 in Rabat
(Morocco) and followed with a journey to Senegal in the footsteps of German sculptor Arno
Breker – controversial for his collaboration with Hitler and the Nazis – who worked for King
Hassan II of Morocco and President Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal in the 1970s.
The title of the exhibition is characteristic of Braun's artistic strategy of exploring cultural and
intercultural contexts and reintegrating historical and personal truths. “Salo” implies several
layers of meaning: in France it has an insulting connotation; in Finland, which accounts for a
part of Braun's biographical background, it means 'solitude' and is also the name of a town.
At the same time, it is the title of Pasolini's last film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975),
which makes reference to events in the northern Italian city of Salò shortly before the end of
World War II, which enjoyed ambivalent fame as the capital of Mussolini's Italian Social
Republic.
In Braun's oeuvre, perspectives are shifted and opened up, facts reassembled and combined
to generate equivocal meanings. Braun's works range from smaller objects that in part
suggest folk pieces – ceramics, batiks, or mouth-blown glass objects – to photography and
space-consuming installations.
His approach for the most part condenses a mix of facts, meanings, images, and forms into a
complex network of associations in which each object and each of the materials used
transcends itself. Part of this is a search in which he pursues historical, cultural, or
biographical contexts that are brought together by a process of association. Braun's telling
and assembling of individual 'stories' impressively present the development of history as a
fragile process of the cultural production of meaning. In doing so, his associations are always
consciously speculative and unstable, without fixing contexts.
The subject areas and materials presented in the exhibition at Noisy-le-Sec are equally
multifaceted. These include butterfly collections and a room displaying burnished brass
plates. Braun has rooms filled with centimeter-thick screed, and illuminates the fluorescent
paint on the wall with a black light, resulting in a surreal atmosphere. Another work is the ten-
part series of black-and-white offset prints (Pierre, Pierre). It features motifs from different
sources. The photograph of an African mask is a poster motif for the first Festival des Arts
Nègres that took place in 1966 in Dakar and makes reference to the ambivalent character
Léopold S. Senghor. As early as the thirties, Senghor, a lyric poet and Senegal's first elected
president, was a formative influence on the worldwide Négritude movement, exemplary of the
reciprocal and contradictory influences between Europe and Africa.
On the artist
Matti Braun, born in 1968 in Berlin, lives and works in Cologne. He studied at the Städel
School in Frankfurt am Main and at the Braunschweig College of Fine Arts.
He has had solo shows at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, at the Liechtenstein art museum
and at L’Appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco.
He has presented a major solo exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig until 14
November and is participating to the group exhibitions “Mental Archaeology” (with Thea
Djordjadze and Jean-Luc Moulène) at the Kunstverein Nürnberg until 5 December and at the
Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine until 19 December.
He is represented by BQ (Berlin), Esther Schipper (Berlin), and galleria S.A.L.E.S (Rome):
www.bqberlin.de / www.estherschipper.com / www.galleriasales.it
Catalogue
La Galerie in Noisy-le-Sec, the Kunstverein Braunschweig and Walther König Buchhandlung
are copublishing a catalogue in conjunction with the exhibitions, with contributions by Sarah
Frost, Mika Hannula, Abdellah Karroum, Maguèye Kassé, Marianne Lanavère, Janne
Marniemi, Rudolph Smend, Jakob Vogel, Hilke Wagner and Paola Yacoub.
Bilingual German/French
Image: Atol, Installation shot, Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2010
Photo: Peter Sierigk
Opening Friday 10 December 6:00–9:00 pm
Press preview 5:00–6:00 pm in the presence of the artist
La Galerie Contemporary Art Centre
1 rue Jean Jaurès, Noisy-le-Sec
Opening hours: Tuesday - Friday, 2 pm – 6 pm
Saturday, 2:00 – 7:00 pm
Closed from 20 December – 3 January