calendario eventi  :: 

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23/6/2015

Eight exhibition

Palais de Tokyo, Paris

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot: Acquaalta
Curated by: Daria de Beauvais

This summer, Palais de Tokyo sees its exhibition spaces fundamentally transformed when it welcomes a major installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (born 1961, lives in Sète).

This singular artist of the French scene represents at the same time France at the Venice biennale (9 May - 22 November 2015).

Acquaalta is the annual flood in the Venetian lagoon. In summer 2015, this same phenomenon takes over the spaces of Palais de Tokyo. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot creates a lakeside landscape which leads visitors into an experience, at once tactile, visual and auditory, which changes their perception of the space: “It is good to worry the visitor sometimes, to give him or herself a coded image. People love seeing themselves disappear.” (Céleste Boursier-Mougenot)
As they move across this flooded space, visitors enters a stream of images which set the scene for an imaginary journey, a voyage through their own psyche.

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Patrick Neu
Curated by: Katell Jaffrès

This summer the first major exhibition of little-known artist Patrick Neu (born in 1963, lives in Alsace) takes place at Palais de Tokyo.

For 30 years, Patrick Neu has been developing his skill away from the limelight. With each work, he turns traditional technique on its head and embarks on new experiments which he continues for as long as necessary. He works with materials not often found in the world of art: bee wings, soot on glass, crystal, wax, Chinese ink sculpture, butterfly wings, shed snakeskin, eggshells, painting on ashes… “I turn materials and practices on their head. Crystal is, for me, simultaneously sharp, heavy, fragile and transparent (…) If I use it to make a warrior object, for example, this opens the way for questions …” (Patrick Neu)

The works selected for the exhibition are a nod to his perilous dialogue with the materials and world memory: Samurai armour in crystal and a straightjacket made from bee wings, specially created for the exhibition, a glass column blackened by smoke, birds feet cast in metal, dying iris watercolours, a dead Christ on carbonised paper, a recollection of Jérôme Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in smoke on glass…

Patrick Neu’s work is epitome of a bubbling abstract Museum. He converses with the figures of Bosch, Holbein and Rubens and reproduces them in black smoke, guided by the properties of the material.

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Jesper Just: Servitudes
Curated by: Katell Jaffrès

For his Palais de Tokyo solo exhibition, Jesper Just (born 1974, lives in New York) has created a new installation which combines multiple videos, music and a spatial intervention.

In his film work, Jesper Just links images of an exceptional quality to sound and music. The enigma disrupts the narrative, creating a tension that lets the poetry of the space emerge. Jesper Just does not provide a solution in his narrative, leaving the observer with his own questions and emotions.

In the lower gallery at Palais de Tokyo, Jesper Just will creates an audiovisual installation and a vast spatial intervention which will transform the existing space and the visitor’s journey. The film’s setting, the equally iconic and controversial One World Trade Center, becomes, as in much of Jesper Just’s work, a character itself, serving here as a phantom limb, indicative of absence and loss, but likewise a testament to resilience. Its presence, somehow inorganic, appears like a prosthetic limb within an altered skyline. The films follow two characters: a young girl who doesn't appear as an individual but embodies the ideals of youth and femininity conveyed by contemporary society, and a disabled child. Within the videos the characters mirror, oppose and interact, to explore themes of ableism, agency as well as the boundaries of body and selfhood.

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Korakrit Arunanondchai: Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3

"Painting with history in a room filled with people with funny names 3" is the epilogue to a series of works created during the past four years, about the making of a painter. In the present world, where reality and fiction merge together to form diverse paradigms, Korakrit Arunanondchai develops his character: a Thai denim painter. His autobiography, his constructed image as an artist, the social realities of present-day Thailand, and the phenomenon of globalization are mixed together in the exhibition to form what the artist calls “a memory palace.”

The installation is made in two parts. “The Body” is composed of a large denim body painting, only visible in its entirety from a bird’s eye view. It functions as a landscape and a stage for the audience. “The Spirit” presents a video, in the artist converses with Chantri - the invisible main character of the trilogy and the incarnation of the audience and Korakrit Arunanondchai’s consciousness, voiced by Chutatip Arunanondchai.

Korakrit Arunanondchai looks to the Buddhist and Animist framework of Thailand, as well as to popular culture, geopolitics and technology, to question what it means to be an artist today, while celebrating connectivity, the merging of art and life, of fantasy and reality, of science and incorporeality.

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Tianzhuo Chen
Curated by: Khairuddin Hori

Palais de Tokyo presents the very first solo exhibition in France of Chinese young artist Tianzhuo Chen (born 1985, lives and works in Beijing, China), one of the most promising artists of his generation.

Tianzhuo Chen uses a colourful, grotesque and kitsch imagery, dominated by direct references to drugs, LGBT hip hop, the London rave scene, Japanese Butoh, voguing in New York and the fashion world, to forge an intimate connection between his works and the collapse of moral attitudes and beliefs we see around us.

Tianzhuo Chen’s characters may seem strangely familiar. This is because they are caricatures of our celebrity-filled daily lives. Everything a celebrity says or does becomes a new mythology and creates a new system of beliefs which fans follow blindly. For his solo exhibition at Palais de Tokyo, Tianzhuo Chen is putting together a collection of hitherto unseen works, including a performance with artist and dancer Beio and the artist collective House of Drama from Paris.

Mixing painting, drawing, installation, video and performance, his works incorporate a number of religious symbols into iconographic elements borrowed from several urban subcultures which are shared by a global youth culture.

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Les Modules - Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent:

Shelly Nadashi

The Exhibition Leaves is “a project on the pretences, illusion and speculation surrounding what makes an artwork” according to Shelly Nadashi (b. 1981, lives and works in Paris). A new set of her works is on show including a short film about a crow accused of theft, in which, deep in a forest, a lawyer reads its indictment. One cannot speak while the other is blind; both convoke the archetypes of moral fables such as Aesop or La Fontaine, and are entwined with the clichéd language of the law or post-industrial economics: the artist's texts twist her wild imagination together with set phrases. The Exhibition Leaves is a fine play on words, on the appearance and disappearance of the work of art. The core of this project focuses on a series of ceramic tree leaves, opaque masks, tribal totem poles or stationary sculptures. It explores the tension between the physical dimension of the space in which the viewer and the works meet, and other spaces in which the works circulate in a more ethereal fashion.

Through a variety of supports including film, performance, the art of puppetry and the manufacture of objects, Shelly Nadashi expresses her interest in the value of things and people, symbolic value and market value, as well as the ambivalent position of the artist in society, seen as “entertainer”. She imagines situations which at first seem absurd and include archetypic characters – a menacing Russian panderer, a hypnotic masseuse, a dynamic executive preparing a soup – which she activates during her performances, placing the viewer in a possibly unpleasant situation. Her works take a look at the creative yet alienating power of speech and show “how language can produce a choreography and tempo” (1) while still allowing space for interpretation.

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Basma Alsharif

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" quote from Frederick Nietzsche's The Gay Science: the Greatest Weight, Book IV (page 273) translation by Walter Kaufmann

Basma Alsharif invites you to a room created for a fictive character, Renée.

A dark room. A white carpet. One tape player. Two monitors : the first one reflects your presence; the other reflects Renee's world. All the elements create ephemeral intersections that function as a loop where the room breathes in the absence of its lodger. Alternating between darkness and light, from silence to sound, renewal and repetition are enacted.

Born in Kuwait, raised between the US and Palestine, Basma Alsharif works her singular experience of nomadism and a deep interest in the Human Condition. She works with cinema and installation.

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Hannah Bertram

By combining decorative motifs with worthless materials, [my] works offer an alternative experience of preciousness in which value is found not in the perpetuity and richness of ornamented objects, but within subtlety of transient experience.”

Australian artist Hannah Bertram designed three large strips of gold wallpaper adorned with flocked motifs inspired by decorative Victorian patterns. Blossoming from the dust she patiently collected from Palais de Tokyo's spaces, as well as from the sinuous catacombs and other symbolic places in Paris, and mixed with the ashes from the scraps of her previous works, she will in turn burn the scraps from Phoenix in Ruins to use them in a new creation, perpetuating an endless transformation. Much like the ancient Phoenix summoned by her title, the rebirth of a work from its ashes also underscores the fate of time and the temporality of things.

Hannah Bertram brings forth an unexpected connection between decoration, dust and death. The flocking technique, which consists in applying textile fibre, or “velvet dust” as the artist finely puts it, to a sticky surface, has over time revealed the use of toxic elements such as arsenic that insidiously distil their fatal poison throughout the shelter of the home. Bertram also uses ornamentation to examine the versatility of taste throughout time. Her works composed of worthless materials, dust, ash and other residue left behind by our existence, display complex motifs that evolve then devolve. Their ephemeral nature evokes Buddhist mandalas or Indian kolams and rangoli designs.

Hannah Bertram was born in 1973. She holds two art degrees from RMIT University, lives and works in Australia. Her work has been exhibited in Australia, the United States and Hong-Kong. Following her residencies in Australia Council’s studio in New York and in the Nordisk Kunstnarcenter, Norway, she is currently a resident artist at SAM Art projects

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Aram Bartholl

“From the very beginning, I always encouraged people to leave their art on there. Especially for the MoMA dead drops, I made this blog post like, ‘If you want to be able to claim you had art in the MoMA, you can just go now and put something on there'.” Aram Bartholl

Dead Drops is a participative project started in 2010 by German multi-media artist Aram Bartholl. A dead drop or dead letter box is a term from the field of espionage and designates a method used to transmit information or items at a secret location. This anonymous peer to peer file-sharing network is based on USB keys cemented into a wall or other support in public space. The GPS coordinates of the site are then posted on the Dead Drops website. Each dead drop is installed empty except for a simple text file explaining the project. Users are invited to share documents, pics, digital works, films or whatever suits their fancy. A computer with a USB port is the only thing needed to connect to the not interconnected network.

After having installed and referenced the first five dead drops in New York and on the web, Bartholl's project unexpectedly took off, spreading internationally. As of May 2015, over 1520 Dead Drops had been submitted to deaddrops.com. Aside from its crazy concept, the project tries to rematerialise the dematerialised world of computers. Following the revelations by Edward Snowden, at a time when clouds and the debate on internet censorship and privacy have become hot topics, this project is now more then ever front and center on the political stage.

Born in Germany in 1972, Bartholl focuses on interrelations between the digital world and our physical surroundings. He obtained his degree in architecture from the University of arts in Berlin, where he lives and works. His artistic work has been shown in numerous festivals and exhibitions in museums and galleries. In 2011, five Dead Drops were part of the “Talk to me” exhibition at the MoMA in New York and a new facet of the project saw the day in 2013 with the installation of a DVD Dead Drop at Museum of the Moving Image in New York as well. Palais de Tokyo is the first French institution to welcome Dead Drops

Image: ADAHA, documentation de performance, 2014, Artist and Bank Gallery, Shanghai, Photographed by Yan Zhuang

Press Contact: Dolores Gonzales

Opening: 4 June 2015 From 12 noon to 12 midnight

Palais De Tokyo
13, avenue du Président Wilson,
75 116 Paris

Opening Hours
From 12 noon to 12 midnight every day except Tuesday
Closed annually on January 1, May 1 and December 25
Special closing time of 18.00 on December 24 and 31

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