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28/10/2005

Michel de Broin

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

Réparations - Une participation volontaire au programme de revalorisation des déchets.

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi is very pleased to show the first solo-exhibition of Michel de Broin in Germany.
For almost a decade Michel de Broin has explored the interplay between artistic practice and social context. His artistic interventions take place in public spaces as well as institutional frameworks. De Broin’s diverse artistic methodologies, especially when employed in public spaces, are reminiscent of neo-avantgarde attempts to carry over the practice of art into the "practice" of life. As in the early 1990s Joshua Decter asserted the necessity for analysing the effects of artistic practices engaged in resistance and political confrontation, so de Broin examines the term "resistance" - fundamentally and also by playing with semantic slippages.

For instance, the Canadian de Broin showed how electrical current reacts to the unusual medium of red wine in order to reveal the phenomena of simultaneous resistance and conductance within a given system (see The Opacity of the Body in the Transparency of Circuits, Centre d’Exposition Circa, 1997). In Stick to Resist (2000) at the Museum Kunsthaus Baselland, de Broin activated niches of the gallery space that normally go unnoticed by placing magnets on exposed metallic surfaces, such as radiators. The magnets are held in place via electrical resistance; as soon as the current is broken, the magnets fall. The work is integrated into the exhibitionary system of the gallery space, and its elements can function only within the site. Thus, the work becomes a parasitic intervention.

In his latest work de Broin explores air resistance. In the video Réparations –Une participation volontaire au programme de revalorisation des déchets (2004) the artist is seen walking during a stroll through the streets of Paris collecting discarded plastic bottles and recycling them. To do this he uses a self-made appliance powered by a bicycle pump which compresses a mixture of water and air inside the rescued bottle. Through his incessant pumping the internal pressure reaches its peak, resulting in a loud explosion and the release of the bottle's compressed contents. Transformed into a rocket, the bottle is launched high into the air. De Broin launches the plastic bottles at various locations throughout Paris, ranging from outlying areas to the central Eiffel Tower: on a terrace in Montmartre bystanders look on apprehensively as the makeshift "rocket” blasts off. As the title makes clear, de Broin is engaged in "voluntary participation in a garbage recycling program”, putting into motion a process of re-appropriation and re-valuing of cast off objects. While doing his part for the improvement of the urban environment, de Broin also playfully tests the notion of an artistic practice that effects social change. In the social environment, however, the bang provokes psychological resistance: onlookers are clearly uneasy as they hear the plastic bottles blasting off. De Broin is aware of the potentially dangerous quality his "social contribution” possesses: alongside Cartesian diagrams, which chart the flight paths of the various bottle "rockets”, de Broin presents the used devices behind safety glass.

Michel de Broin, born 1970 in Montréal, Canada; lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Please contact the gallery for further information.

Reception: October 29th, 2005, from 7pm

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
Schillingstrasse 31 / 10179 Berlin
Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 – 6pm

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