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23/2/2011

Two exhibitions

IAC - Institut d'art contemporain, Villeurbanne

Hans Schabus
Nichts geht mehr

The Institut d'art contemporain has invited Hans Schabus for his first large-scale solo exhibition in France. Born in 1970 in Watschig, Austria, Hans Schabus lives and works in Vienna. Solo exhibitions have been organised in particular in 2003 at the Secession exhibition in Vienna (Astronaut) and in 2007 at Site, Santa Fe, New Mexico (Deserted Conquest).
Hans Schabus was particularly remarked for his monumental wooden structure encompassing the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2005. In 2008, he designed 'Demolirerpolka', a wooden fence that covered the entire façade of the IAC for the exhibition Fabricateurs d'espaces.

The exhibition at the Institute consists of existing and new works by the artist—installations, videos, sculptures and collages. Hans Schabus performs radical acts—digging, filling, encircling, cutting—to destructure and restructure space, changing our references and movements. His works generally refer to his immediate environment and the materials that form it. The artist's studio appears as the matrix of his work, where his life and thinking are spatialised, the first place in which the relation between mental space and physical space is materialised.

The Institut d'art contemporain gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC Rhône-Alpes), the Rhône-Alpes region and the city of Villeurbanne and especially for the exhibition, the support of the Forum Culturel Autrichien.

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Gianni Colombo, Spazio elastico, 1967
In the context of the Laboratory space brain / Station 5
25 February - 24 April 2011
Study day: Thursday 17th March 2011, 1.30 PM

Initiated by the artist Ann Veronica Janssens and Nathalie Ergino, director of the Institut d'art contemporain, the Laboratory space brain uses experiments in art to explore theoretical and practical research linking space and the brain. This interdisciplinary laboratory will assemble the thoughts and experiences of artists, scientists (working in neuroscience, astrophysics, etc.), philosophers, anthropologists, art theoreticians and historians.

Laboratory Space Brain
STATEMENT OF INTENT

Initiated by the artist Ann Veronica Janssens and Nathalie Ergino, director of the Institut d’Art Contemporain, this project proposes to work in the field of artistic experimentation and explore the practical and theoretical research enabling us to link the space and the brain. This interdisciplinary laboratory brings together the reflections and experiments of artists and scientists (neuroscience, physics, astrophysics...), and also of philosophers, anthropologists, art historians and theoreticians.

The principle of the brain space laboratory came about through some mutual observations. Since the 1980s, Ann Veronica Janssens has been exploring, and experimenting with multiple approaches to perception, space, confronting loss of bearings and feelings of reality. She calls upon the skills of specialists with scientific leanings in order to devise areas of sensitivity and acuity in a deliberately intuitive way. Today, in the light of the current acceleration in scientific advances, Ann Veronica Janssens has chosen to place the emphasis on experimentation by setting up a huge “work in progress” of investigations and prototypes.

After numerous shows devoted to artists like Rodney Graham or Carsten Höller, and to group exhibitions such as Maisons-Cerveaux (1995) or Subréel (2002), Nathalie Ergino is seeking to assess the artistic issues involved in these various approaches, which would seem to follow on from those of the 1950-70s, and yet already different through their chronological setting during a period of increased scientific application (cybernetics, electronics...) and research. Can one still designate the unconscious as a potential tool of reality; and what does the notion critical perception mean today?

For present day scientific research is renewing our approach to space and its articulation with the brain. From advances in neurophysiology to physical discoveries (quantum physics, string theory, nanoscience...), our apprehension of the world is now tipping over from Euclidian space into an as yet indeterminate space, undergoing mutation. While thought, taking in the perspectivist Renaissance, has always spatialised and constructed the world, can we still speak today of its representation? This project proposes to explore the cognitive and phenomenological extension of thought, through the consideration of the “corps en acte1” [body in act] as a constituent element of the world. It makes the assumption of going beyond traditional dualities — objectivity / subjectivity, conscious / unconscious, centrality / decentring, materiality / immateriality...

Rather than envisage the relations of the brain to space, this Laboratory means to rely on space itself. First as a possible synonym for the artistic act, secondly as an extension of the eye, brain and body. McLuhan talked about this worldwide extension, saying that man casts his own central nervous system like a net across the globe which he turns into a huge living brain. Why not now picture the cosmos as a brain?

Art could be an intuitive, mobile operating mode, capable of linking research in neuroscience, physics and astrophysics. From the late 1950s, many artists put into practice new approaches to the relationship with the viewer-visitor. From an egocentred posture, which conveyed their feeling in plastic terms, they moved on to propositions of the “allocentred” type, in which the perception of the world was then as it were given to be shared, following a process whereby the “self” and the other blended together, making room for the emergence of the experience per se. So it is important that the Brain Space Laboratory (Station 1) should decode and re-examine these past artistic approaches in the light of contemporary artistic practices.

Above and beyond the visual effects of optical kinetic art, the often three- dimensional works summoned here have generated a new relation to space through their immersive dimension, the introduction of light and movement as raw materials, and also inducing hypnotic or “waking dream” effects (appliances of Nicolas Schöffer, Brion Gysin...).

In an apparently more metaphysical mode and following on from Lucio Fontana, James Turrell also undertakes the conquest of the infinite, decreeing perception to be a medium in itself. What are the bases and characteristics of research being carried out now by Micol Assaël, Berdaguer and Péjus, Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Bertrand Lamarche, Carsten Nicolaï...

PROGRESS OF THE BRAIN SPACE LABORATORY
While the laboratory’s aim is to take part in these upheavals affecting the whole of society, it also involves contributing to the development of artistic research in progress, with no guarantee, however, of ever getting anywhere. Awaiting a possible exhibition, the Brain Space Laboratory will be developed up until 2011 in stages, “stations”, in various forms — day seminars, lectures, papers, presentations of works, collating documentation, publications, blog...

As an exploration unit, the Laboratory will thus pass through various “fields”: neuroscience, physics and astrophysics, nanoscience, new technologies, psychoanalysis and neuroscience, parapsychology, hypnosis and telepathy, non clairvoyance, or again shamanism and animism.
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(1) Lecture by Alain Berthoz,"Espace et cognition", November2005.

Image: Hans Schabus, Klub Europa, 2010 © Alexandre Beugnet

Press contact: Delphine Peyronnet: t. +33 (0)4 78034700 f. +33 (0)4 78034709 d.peyronnet@i-ac.eu

Press Preview: 24 February 2011, 11 a.m.
Opening: 24 February 2011, 6.30 p.m.

Institut d'art contemporain
Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
11 rue Docteur Dolard 69100 Villeurbanne France
Hours:
Wednesday to Sunday 1p.m. - 7p.m.
Admission:
full: 4 € / reduced: 2,50 €

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