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Aurelien Mole
dal 17/12/2015 al 17/1/2016

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Aurelien Mole



 
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17/12/2015

Aurelien Mole

Clark House Initiative, Bombay

Liberty Taken Apart. Mole took the liberty to make a new monument from the fragments of monuments that captured his imagination on walks through the Bombay with students of the Sir JJ School of Art.


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Eugene Flandin was an adventurer who travelled as an orientalist and a socio-grapher documenting West Asia. His approach and reason to be there was somewhere seduced by the want to be in the Orient, somewhere as an agent of France's imperial conquest for a mandate in ancient Mesopotamia and as an artist. His detailed drawings of Persepolis and accounts on the Qajar Dynasty informs of what we think of Iran outside the Islamic Revolution. Aurélien Mole has documented exhibitions for somewhere around a decade harnessing the practice of creating a perspective of a document around an art work, that might already dwell in the same vision. Not far from Paris in the more depressed part of industrial France is the city of Brest. Here at the Center for Contemporary Art - Passerelle he currently has a solo presentation in response to a call for an exhibition 'Gateway' to the centre. Tongue in cheek Mole sent a proposal for an exhibition called Benin a word that can be easily mistaken for Benign. But Benin is a country in West Africa and a region in Nigeria that is known for the longest history for producing the most sophisticated bronze and wood sculptures that are prized throughout the world. The French word for 'Benign' is 'Benin' . Picasso himself wondered at the finesse and the conceptual degree existent in African sculpture often criticising the craft quality of decorative Greek inspired sculpture taught at European schools. Picasso a self taught sculptor made Africa his site for inspiration as he gathered incomprehensible ingredients to make fabulous sculptures, Africa was to inspire Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus group who paid it ode by rejecting the linear trajectory of European A rt History that refused to include the world. So how does the 'Benin Bronze' enter into a solo show by a photographer and an art historian who has studied curating? This question that in itself is compelling in the dichotomies it presents in terms of exoticism, conceptual practice and the politics that intervene into the criticism of the effort. Mole in his solo debut at Clark House Initiative and the Sir JJ School of Art rather does not shy away from this discomfort but puts out a studied answer that engulfs the questions of conceptual art and craft.

Mole has been a regular visitor to India since his youth. But last year as a part of a group show 'And they laid traps for the Troubadours' at the Clark House in association with the Kadist Art Foundation he conducted a workshop at the Sir JJ School of Art Printmaking Studio. Here he began to watch how bystanders from the local commuter train terminus - CST across the street would gather at the fence of the school and watch students of the sculpture department grind stones into graduation submissions. Mole is well known to have documented many exhibitions in Paris often photographing various mediums that are concocted into art. Thus the view and the perspective of the viewer is of keen interest to him. Born in Tehran having left it as an infant Mole returned to Iran with his parents in 2009. So between tourist visits to Persepolis and Isfahan and the streets his father tread when he was born Mole began to document quotidian objects such as brooms and panes of glass left at street corners and below falling apart Zoroastrian temples. Only the stone that supported them told us about the antiquity of the location and magically those three rested brooms spelt themselves out as sculpture. Mole had used the same perspective and distance he used to photograph artworks. Somewhere he wanted to sculpt the view of the grand public that encountered the monuments crafted at JJ School over the century sitting pretty under trees around the city's heritage district.

Another travel writer whose anti-monarchistic writing and acts made him unpopular in Britain, wrote about the city being the ugliest city anywhere due to its architecture which formed the district of Kala Ghoda nothing more than an architectural sodom. He wrote: “the nineteenth century devised nothing lower than the municipal buildings of British India. Their ugliness is positively daemonic”. He wrote about them in the early 20th century these buildings had not yet aged nor had they grown the overgrowth of tropical vegetation. Therefore when Clark House approached Aurelien Mole for a project for the festival 'Liberty Taken' he suggested he take apart the monuments to create an exhibition that was literally 'Taken Apart'.

The students of the Sir JJ School of Art after their degrees in sculpture often get absorbed into the numerous ateliers that are based in the city's suburbs. Here they cast in fibreglass murals and sculptures that then adorn the Neo-Greco Palladian lobbies of the numerous skyscrapers in the city that promise homes akin to New York living. A practice in craft then engulfs their lives. Aurelien Mole passed through academies that had given up traditional didactics of a Fine Art Academy, they had become places that allowed only conceptual art. Sculpture after the 'Arte Povera' revolution and the dependence on the found object had become streamlined in its aesthetic. Mole rather preferred to question the homogenous representation of the idea which he of ten encountered in the exhibitions he documented. Therefore his workshops began with a nihilistic effort at sculpting soap from mounds of mud and refuse pieces of marble lying around in the college courtyard. The students had to use the soap until it got to a bespoke style that reflected their use of a diminishing commodity. They then replicated it in a material that would last forever.

Aurelien Mole lead the students to a walkathon around the city of Bombay studying the mural reliefs designed by Lockwood Kipling the famous Dean of the JJ School at the Crawford Market. He them made them distinguish the animal motifs and the design at the fountains in the market and the bases of pillars at the CST Terminus previously known as Victoria Terminus, one of the grandeurs of the British Raj that dwarfed St. Pancras of London. The students were to decide which element they would choose from the monuments if a French style revolution would occur and out of popular demand relics of the previous regime were to be destroyed. This happened in India post independence and we visited the garden outside the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum or the Ex- V& A of Bombay , which now also serves a graveyard of the city& #39;s imperial sculptures of long gone Viceroys and Empresses. The students began to measure the hand of Queen Victoria, another liked Lord Hardinge's hand on a book and Meher Vahid chose the only monument that glorified the working woman in art deco at the New India Assurance Building.

The students have for weeks worked on hard and unrelenting yellow basalt stones commonly known as Malad Stone. Their perspectives of sculpture have changed, their view on the idea of 'Modern Art' has been questioned. Their ability to deal with the question of the conceptual has been strengthened and they have understood the inheritance they receive as students of the sculpture department at the Sir JJ School of Art and its relationship with the city. An artist who has played with the idea of the document and the perception has made a solo that entails the presence of a largely curated collaborative group exhibition that manages multiple voices in art. Aurelien Mole has translated his experience with a vocabulary that is not akin to the vocabulary of art in the Occident. He parasites them by laying the sculpted stones on aluminium beds filled with red laterite soil, debris and planted with the city's common parasites that dwell in the cracks of Neo-Gothic buildings - the long rooted Peepul and Banyan trees.

Sumesh Sharma 2015, Bombay.

Artists:

In Stone:
Avinash Mahesh Shivsharan
Rushikesh Prakash Panchal
Ketan Khutle
Siddhant Pitale - Sceptre
Neel Shinde
Yogesh Barve - Clark House
Sandhip Dagle
Navnath Fengase
Chittaranjan Nandanwar
Arvind Shamro Mangal
Akash Ashok Tirmal
Abhishek Ashok Salve
Meher Danyal Vahid - New india Assurance building
Rahul Raghunath Rinjad
Prasad Parkhe
Sachin Bonde - Broken tusk of elephant from Khajuraho
Shrinivas Mehetre

In Soap:
Prasad Nikumbh - Dettol
Shrinivas Mehetre - Medimix
Sucheta Ghadge - Life Boy
Saviya Lopes - Dettol
Ranjeeta Kumari - Liril
Aurélien Mole - Dove

"Aurélien Mole cultivates a dandy artist approach, combining sophisticated erudite and poetic precision how. His work plays with insight from the historical and artistic reference, moved frequently, always under control. His proposal Gateway to Contemporary Art Center mischievously entitled "Benin" somewhere between nonchalance and exoticism convene sharing histories of art and technology - especially photographic - like many objects of study and creating bases . Both mechanical and heart of the exhibition, a film draws inspiration from the research Hippolyte Bayard. This photographer and inventor, the Ministry of Finance used to spend his lunch breaks on the roof of the administration where he had the plast er statuettes on black face of a camera obscura to obtain images silhouetted in white on black paper of his invention. As often with Bayard, the artist takes over the researcher, and statuettes made ​​of plaster, simple experience of subjects chosen for their quality of whiteness, are multiplying in compositions increasingly baroque." In view of Bayard, Aurélien Mole studied and plays the conditions of appearance of things, their tangibility in the representation and production." Text from his solo presentation '' Benin'' at the Passerele | Centre of Contemporary Art, Brest.

Aurélien Mole was born in 1975 in Tehran.He graduated the School of the Louvre in History of Photography, he continued hisstudies at the National School of Photography in Arles and concluded his training program by a Master on curatorial practices led by Catherine Perret and Christian Bernard. His work has been the subject of a solo exhibition at the Lucile Corty gallery in 2009 (En bonne Intelligence), at the art center la Villa du Parc in 2012 (Sir Thomas Trope) and at Passerelle in 2015 (Bénin). He participated in many group shows in France and Europe (Cargo Cult at the Vitrine, Paris; Ré pétition dans l’épilogue, Lucile Corty gallery Paris, If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want to Be part of your Revolution, Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven, Double Bind, Villa Arson, Nice, La voix dissociée, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Clouds in the Cave, FriArt, Fribourg) and in USA (Riding the frothing thread, Jaus, LA). He had alsopublished regularly in the magazine Art21, some reviews related to the exhibition as well as monographs on contemporary artists (Aurélien Froment, Guillaume Leblon, Gaël Pollin ...). He has also realisedexhibitions within the c uratorial collective Le Bureau/ (P2P at Casino, Luxembourg, en 2008 ; Un Plan Simple, Maison Populaire of Montreuil, en 2009) and in its own name (Les Images Vieillissent Autrement que Ceux qui les Font in 2012 at CNEAI, Les Référents, with Etienne Bernard at Gennevilliers en 2012, Saison Iconographe, 2015, Villa du Parc). He’s the co-foundator of the magazine Postdocument (www.postdocument.net). Aurelien Mole has shown at the Clark House Initiative in January 2014 as a part of an exhibition in collaboration w ith the Kadist Art Foundation Paris. He is one of the two artists visiting Bombay as a part of the Liberty Taken International Arts Festival in multi party venues in Bombay. Liberty Taken Apart is his solo presentation where he curates, collaborates , photographs and is an artist along with others.

Liberty Taken
It is a Clark House project in association with the Institut Français, Osianama at Liberty, Sir JJ School of Art, & Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam. Supported by the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris. The Project is a collaboration where Osianama at Liberty opens its space to interventions that are demonstrative towards engaging a young audience of artists and students towards cinema, creating a critical enagagement between cinema and the visual arts. Sir JJ School of Art, notably the Printmaking and Sculpture departments enter into dialogue with the artist Aurelien Mole and their students on conceptual sculptural practices.

The publication is supported by the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam as part of the Kamrado project, which travels to the city and further on to the India Art Fair in 2016. Kadist Art Foundation, Paris is the author with Clark House of the exhibition format, structured on artist travel. Insitut Français is the primary sponsor and facilitator of the project.

Sir JJ School of Arts, Fine Arts Building.
4.30 - 6.30 PM
Crawford Market, Bombay

Clark House Bombay
7 - 10 PM

Supported by the Sir JJ School of Art

Dean Vishwanath Sabale, Prof. Anant Nikam, Studio in Charge
Prof. Madhukar Wanjari, Prof. Nitin Mistry, and Prof.Ipte of the Sculpture Department

IN ARCHIVIO [24]
Aurelien Mole
dal 17/12/2015 al 17/1/2016

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