calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/11/2011

One caption hides another

Betonsalon, Paris

With: Agency, Daniel Boyd, Peggy Buth, Jimmie Durham, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Camille Henrot, Patrizio di Massimo, Uriel Orlow, Francis Upritchard, Françoise Vergès (Maison des Civilisations et de l’Unité Réunionnaise), Susan Vogel.

"When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture."
Statues also die (1953), Chris Marker and Alain Resnais

One caption hides another aims to expand the field countering official history by taking as a departure point a key topic in current museological debates, that of anthropological restitution. Inspired by the recent repatriation of the Maori warrior head from the Museum of Rouen to its ancestral home, New Zealand, this exhibition and series of events propose an exploration into the ethical, scientific, political and legal issues arising from cases of restitution.

One caption hides another further aims to problematise the displacement between traditional and cult object, on the one hand, and historical and museological object, on the other. Can an object have different statuses? Who can legitimately make this decision? Are there different possible narratives to understand and read these objects? A critical deconstruction of these questions will make visible and legible the fact that a caption on an exhibition label often hides another beneath it.

Addressing the topics of collective memory and heritage, One caption hides another creates a meeting point for artworks, ethnographic and juridical documents, films and museographic projects. Documenting real situations, making use of fiction or radicalising one’s relation to heritage, the artists, researchers and platforms invited in this project are all engaged in reflexive endeavours concerning the museological object and challenging ethnographic representation.

Parallel Events

Wednesday 16 november
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris
:: 6.30pm - 9.30pm - Evening programme - “Hantologie des Colonies"

Event led by Laetitia Kugler, in the presence of Patrizio di Massimo, Brigitta Kuster and Uriel Orlow
Patrizio di Massimo, Oae, 13 min, french subtitles, 2009
Brigitta Kuster & Moise Merlin Mabouna, 2006-1892 = 114 ans, 7 min, french subtitles, 2006
Brigitta Kuster & Moise Merlin Mabouna, À travers l’encoche d’un voyage dans la bibliothèque coloniale. Notes pittoresques, 25 min, french subtitles, 2009
Uriel Orlow, The Visitor, 16 min, french subtitles, 2007
Penny Siopis, Obscure White Messenger, 14 min, french subtitles, 2010

Elaborating on the exhibition My Last Life by Belgian artist Vincent Meessen at Espace Khiasma (30 September – 12 November 2011), the association Normal proposes a choice of films focusing on the re-emergence of the ghost of the colonial past in the contemporary artistic scene. Organised and produced by Khiasma, “Hantologie des colonies" spreads out to twelve art centres, intermediary spaces and cinemas in Paris and its suburbs.

Thrsady 17 november
Musée du quai Branly - in the framework of the seminar "Under the free sky of history"
:: 7pm - Mummy lecture: an encounter with the group Artefakte//anti-humboldt

Through a film-lecture, Artefakte//anti-humboldt proposes a narrative whose central subject is the figure of the mummy in cinema. The mummy operates on a manifold site of historical coincidence, where the development of cinema, the European imperial project and the disciplines of archaeology and psychoanalyse meet. As a filmic “chronotopos”, the mummy deals with the liminality of the concept of “artefact”. As a lifeless body that colonialism and Egyptomania have appropriated and decontextualised, the mummy opens up a field of attraction and conflict between subject (human) and object (not human), death and life, nature and culture, real and representation. With the historical discovery of the Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, the creepy along with the mummy’s curse supersedes the mysterious, the fantastic and the curious associated with the mummy of the early films. In the museum or on its way to it, the mummy becomes disparate and dangerously destructive: it/(s)he embodies the undying resistance against the idea of objectification, reification. It/(s)he activates diachrony – the curse, the revenge, the unresolved history. It is only when the mummy’s corpse falls into dust that the mummy in film finds satisfying closure. Artefakte//anti-humboldt is a Berlin based group of artists and scholars that was founded in 2008 as part of the event “Der Anti-Humboldt” (www.humboldtforum.info) against the reconstruction of the Prussian castle and the Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. Following this event, Artefakte//anti-humboldt pursues its questioning of the ethnographic museums by organizing among other a workshop asking questions on restitution, a lecture and a debate with Françoise Vergès on the “Museum of the present” and an open-air film lecture with mummy films held at the construction site of the to-be-built castle in Berlin.

Saturday 10 december
Bétonsalon
:: 2pm-7pm

2pm-4.30pm: The circulation of objects as a postcolonial lever. “The objects found in ethnographic collections in Europe are key elements in the articulation between colonial past and present memory” (Lotte Arndt). Proposed by the researcher Lotte Arndt, the first part of this day will be devoted to a discussion on the issues arising from the circulation of artifacts in the postcolonial context, with, among other participants, political scientist Françoise Vergès.
5pm-7pm: Assembly (One caption hides another) In Assembly (One caption hides another), Agency speculates on the question: "How can objects be included within art practices?". Thing 001635 (Australian Coat of Arms) will convene an assembly to bear witness. Thing 001635 concerns the conflict between indigenous elders and the Commonwealth about the use of totems in the Australian Coat of Arms. Agency invited a diverse group of concerned guests (a lawyer, an activist, an ethologist and a designer) to "respond".

Tuesday 10 december
Fondation d’entreprise Ricard
:: 7pm-8pm - Aide-Mémoire (v.8) : a lecture performed by Uriel Orlow

In Aide-Mémoire Orlow presents salvaged visuals of a possible film, reflects on blind-spots of history and explores the territory between travelogue, slideshow and immersive sound-scape. Chains of association, visual clues and narrative fragments are woven into new configurations of past and future and reconstructed meanings. Biblical Mount Ararat, a Ghost Town in Northern Armenia on the site of an earthquake, a Kurdish village in Turkey built out of the rubble of an ancient Armenian monastery, death masks of Soviet luminaries – all conjure symbols, ghosts from the past and the future of History
Betonsalon
Paris Francia
Esplanade des Grands Moulins - Rez-de-Chaussee de la Halle aux Farines 47-51

Betonsalon
9 esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Rez-de-chaussée de la Halle aux Farines - Paris
Free admission

stampa

permanent link