calendario eventi  :: 

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14/10/2013

Three exhibitions

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Natacha Nisic
Echo

Curators: Natacha Nisic with Marta Gili.

The work of Natacha Nisic (born in Grenoble in 1976) continually explores the invisible, even magical relationship between images, words, interpretation, symbol and ritual. Her work interweaves links between stories, accounts of the past and the present, to reveal the complexities of the relationship between what is shown and what is hidden, the spoken and the unspoken. Natacha Nisic, who was awarded residencies at the Villa Kujoyama in 2001 and the Villa Medici in 2007, calls into question the nature of the image through various media: Super 8, 16 mm, video, photography and drawing. Her fixed and moving images function as substrata of memory, memory torn between its value as proof and its loss, and are all statements about the status of images and the possibilities of representation.

Continuing her meditation on the image process, the visible and the invisible, the document and narration, Natacha Nisic presents several installations that she has created since 1995, including Andrea in Conversation and f, two new works produced specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition begins with Catalogue de gestes, inviting the viewer to a reinterpretation of the perceptible world by juxtaposing intimate stories, historic or mythological.

In Indice Nikkei (2003-2013), a sound installation created in 2003 that has been set in space within the rooms of the Jeu de Paume, two soundproofed rooms echo each other. This new piece was created in collaboration with the creator and creator-performer Donatienne Michel-Dansac, who “sings” in an unusual vocal style the fluctuations of the money market indexes and the stock prices of companies affected by the latest crises. In the two strictly identical rooms, suffused in saturated color, a score of astonishing fragility is performed.

Andrea en conversation (2013 / produced by the Jeu de Paume, Seconde Vague Productions with the support of the sponsorship commission of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques), a video installation consisting of nine screens, presents two characters who form an impossible couple: Andrea Kalff, a young Bavarian woman who became a Korean shaman in 2007, and Norbert Weber, a Benedictine missionary in Bavaria, who shot the first films of Korea (Im Lande der Morgenstille, 1927). Their common meeting with this distant land a century apart resulted for both of them in a deep inner revolution. Fascinated by the Koreans’ unique culture, Norbert Weber attempts to convert them, while the modern young woman from a Catholic background engages in a reverse conversation with Korea. Initiated by Kim Keumhwa, the great Korean shaman, Andrea is entrusted with ensuring the survival of this “national treasure,” this final pocket of cultural resistance, through her own conversion. The installation sets up a dialogue between their two extraordinary paths, thereby decentering our gaze. Following in the tracks of European colonial expansion and Christian evangelism, the nomination and conversion of a German shaman seems to be an astonishing turnaround. Shot in Bavaria, this work presents a fragmented vision of contemporary Korea in which the vestiges of different eras coexist, from the shamanic tradition to the consequences of the Cold War.

In e (2009), which means image in Japanese, the artist provides an account of a trip to northern Japan, near Fukushima, in search of an inaccessible region devastated by the earthquake in June 2008. Instead of images of the earthquake, Natacha Nisic uses ones depicting its impact on places and their inhabitants. This account takes the form of an installation with three projections operating alternately like a musical score. For this exhibition, the artist created a response to this work, entitled f, as in Fukushima (2013). Two years after the catastrophe, the artist went to Fukushima to look at the landscapes, the villages and the people who suffered from the devastation of the tsunami and the radiation from the power station. Thanks to a system consisting of a camera dolly 25 meters long and vertical mirrors 30 centimeters wide placed at different intervals, the artist enables the eye to take in at the same time the shot and the reverse shot, the before and the after. When the cameras passes in front of a mirror, a moving image of the reverse shot slides in a horizontal tracking shot in the opposite direction in the mirror. This creates, with no recourse to special effects, an interplay of one image within another, one movement in another, of a landscape and its vis-à-vis. The arrangement makes it possible to combine movements and spaces in a single view at one time.

PARTNERS
Exhibition produced by the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

In partnership with A Nous, ARTE, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, Radio Nova, Time Out

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Erwin Blumenfeld (1897-1969)
Photographs, drawings and photomontages

Curator: Ute Eskildsen, former deputy director and head of the photographical collections for the Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Erwin Blumenfeld’s life and work impressively document the socio-political context of artistic development between the two World Wars, while highlighting the individual consequences of emigration. The exhibition devoted to Erwin Blumenfeld’s multi-layered œuvre brings together over 300 works and documents from the late 1910s to the 1960s, and encompasses the various media explored by the artist throughout his career: drawings, photographs, montages and collages.

This exhibition traces his visual creativity and encompasses the early drawings, the collages and montages, which mostly stem from the early 1920s, the beginnings of his portrait art in Holland, the first black and white fashion photographs of the Paris period, the masterful colour photography created in New York and the urban photos taken toward the end of his life.

The retrospective also showcases his drawings, many of which have never been shown before, as well as his early collages and photomontages, shedding fascinating light on the evolution of his photographic oeuvre and revealing the full extent of his creative genius. The now classic motifs of his experimental black-and-white photographs can be seen alongside his numerous selfportraits and portraits of famous and little-known people, as well as his fashion and advertising work.

In the first years of his career, he worked only in black and white, but as soon as it became technically possible he enthusiastically used color. He transferred his experiences with black-and-white photography to color; applying them to the field of fashion, he developed a particularly original repertoire of forms. The female body became Erwin Blumenfeld’s principal subject. In his initial portrait work, then the nudes he produced while living in Paris and, later on, his fashion photography, he sought to bring out the unknown, hidden nature of his subjects; the object of his quest was not realism, but the mystery of reality.

Blumenfeld’s work was showcased most recently in France in a 1981 show at the Centre Pompidou, which focused on his fashion photography, in 1998 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, as well as more recently in the exhibition “Blumenfeld Studio, Colour, New York, 1941-1960” (Chalon-sur-Saône, Essen, London).

PARTNERS
Exposition produced by the Jeu de Paume, Paris.
In partnership with A Nous, de l’air, LCI and Stylia, Vogue Paris, Time Out, France Inter and Fip.
We would like to thank the Hôtel Castille, Paris.

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Exhibitions - A Projection
Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s, fourth movement. A proposal by Mathieu Copeland

Part of the Satellite programme, “Suite for Exhibition(s) and Publication(s)” is a reflection, in four movements, on the exhibition, its image and its representation, as well as its catalogue. Titled “Exhibitions—A Projection,” the fourth movement examines the exhibition through the concept of projection, in the widest sense of the term—oral, mental, cinematic—whether it be the projection of the word through the reading of the catalogue of a past exhibition (lower ground floor and level –1) or the projection of the text in a film to be read (auditorium).

A Reprise
Reprise /ri’pri:z/ n. & v. : n. 1. A repeated passage in music. 2. A repeated item in a musical programme. v. tr. repeat (a performance, song, etc.); restage, rewrite. [French, fem. past part. of reprendre]

An exhibition, once it has run its course, crystallizes into the products that it generated, in the recollection of those who experienced it, and also in its catalogue, which generally provides details about the works on display. The exhibition catalogue “reproduces” images of the objects that contributed to its existence and/or views of it. It is thus, at best, a memory of it; at worst, it is nothing more than a checklist of it.
This “reprise” of the “Art & Language” exhibition, which took place at the Jeu de Paume between November 9, 1993 and January 2, 1994, reflects as much a desire to revisit the memory of this event as a desire to give it a new reality. Without any works even being shown, the past event is envisaged anew through a reading of its catalogue, which is used as a score. Broadcast in the rooms, the sound recording (engineered by Jonathan Reig) of the entire book—read in French by Olivier Claverie and in English by Kate Lith—permits a new understanding of this exhibition and its relation to the text. However, it restores only a distant echo of the original, affirming the exhibition as constantly expanding material which, as such, can be reprised weeks, months or even years later, in various contexts. Through this “projected” (re)reading, which constitutes a new event in itself, the catalogue thus becomes the libretto of an exhibition that is constantly in becoming.
In parallel, the publication of the collection of poems Life as a Cheap Suitcase, for which Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, a pioneer of industrial music, was given carte blanche, goes beyond the concept of the catalogue as a representation of the exhibition in book form. This publication, to the extent that it conveys the feeling of it, is ultimately both a mirror and a continuation of the exhibition.

A Film to Be Read
In the auditorium, an exhibition of the words is projected continuously in the form of a “film to be read,” consisting of a succession of artists’ texts written specifically for it.
A film noir by Mac Adams, the description of the feeling of a work by Robert Barry, a shared secret by Pratchaya Phinthong, a suspended sentence by Liam Gillick, an abstract computer poem by Claude Closky, the transformation of the dark room of the cinema into an internal theatre by Fia Backström, the use of text by Julien Bismuth to make images “appear,” a mental journey with Georgia Sagri, a polyphony by Cally Spooner and a prediction of time by Oriol Vilanova—all these works are intertwined in a string of words created by Peter Downsbrough. Unified by their typography, the texts are both the subtitles of a film without images and mental projections constructed in the mind of the person reading them.

Mathieu Copeland.
Exhibition curator

Partners:
The Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques contributes to the production of works in the Satellite program.
The Jeu de Paume is a member of the Tram and d.c.a networks, association française de développement des centres d’art.

Media partners:
art press, ParisART, Souvenirs from earth TV, Radio Nova.


Image: Natacha Nisic, Andrea en conversation. Tournage du film, juillet 2013. Installation, 9 vidéos HD, couleur, son, env. 10 min chaque.
Production : Jeu de Paume, Seconde Vague Productions. Avec le soutien de la Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques. Courtesy Galerie Florent Tosin, Berlin. © Natacha Nisic 2013

Press contact:
Annabelle Floriant Tel: +33 (0)1 47031322 / 0642530407 annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris
Hours.
Tuesday: 11am – 9pm
Wednesday - Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Closed Monday, including public holidays.

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