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4/6/2014

Jeppe Hein / Bertille Bak

LiFE - International Space for Emerging Arts, Saint-Nazaire

Jeppe Hein
Distance

The notion of play, central to Jeppe Hein's work, exposes the ambiguity in his approach: is the playful tone of the artist's sculptures and installations not adopted in order to better destabilise the spectator?

At first glance, they seem to connect with the major themes of kinetic art: movement and shared space, the visual event and the spectacular, action and reaction. Jeppe Hein's practice also shares in the heritage of minimalism, remaining loyal to certain recurrent forms (spheres, cubes, labyrinths) and materials (steel, mirror, water).

He makes considerable use of motion sensors, appreciating the discreet magic of their technology. According to whether the public is absent or present, the artist's installations activate, or, on the contrary, vanish: the jet from a sculpture-fountain stops flowing when a spectator approaches, inciting them to move to the centre of the work. The wall of water is then immediately revived, enclosing the surprised member of the public (Space in Action/Action in Space, 2002).

We are sometimes presented with a more perilous experience: a steel ball that begins to move, knocking down everything in its path the moment a visitor enters the exhibition space (360° Presence, 2002) and coming to rest if she leaves.

As expressed by Jeppe Hein, the participative dimension is opposed to demagogy: he doesn't flatter his public. Clearly he is placing the visitor at the centre of an interactive triggering that may often be joyous or mysterious, but he never allows the illusion of a greater association with the artistic act.

As far as a purely recreational reception of the work is concerned, Jeppe Hein treats this with mistrust. If his installations indubitably give pleasure, they also engage in a demanding dialogue with the history of art and architecture.

For the LiFE's monumental space, the artist has imagined a new version of the installation Distance. An immense circuit, conceived as a graphic composition, is extended across a forest of fine metal pillars. Arabesques, spirals and nodal interconnections support a track for a hundred or so white balls, razing the ground or very high up in the air. An infrared sensor detecting the arrival of each visitor triggers the propulsion of a ball, which then journeys through the vast visual and sonic landscape.

As an incitation to explore the space, the construction draws on different sources: a primitive industrial imaginary resurfaces, from the machines of Fritz Lang's Metropolis to Tinguely's assemblages. We also sense the fairground universe of roller coasters and pinball, but Calder's circus as well.

Beyond these reference points telling of the emotion procured by machines and their marvellous mechanisms, Distance plays with space (stretched and supple, folded and unfolding) and the duration of a trajectory, accelerating to high speed at certain points on the circuit, then slowing, almost to a halt. A circuit in equilibrium and in suspension, and an invitation to contemplation.

Eva Prouteau
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The exhibition Distance is part of the outdoor programme of the Grand Café, it will be produced by the LiFE.

Lecture
By Michel Gauthier, critic and curator of the Centre Pompidou collections
Sunday September 21, (to be confirmed) At Le Grand Café

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Bertille Bak
Le tour de Babel (The Tower of Babel)
Exhibition from june 5th to august 31st

In a practice that poetically blends documentary and fiction, Bertille Bak is developing a unique way of thinking about her contemporaries. As an observer of communities forming and breaking up within delimited territories, she works less like an entomologist pinning down species than with the dreamlike recreation of rituals considered as bearing witness to forms of collective living.

Whether it concerns her own community in the mining areas of Northern France or groups that are unfamiliar to her, she never chooses to distance herself or look on from afar. On the contrary, it is all about sharing a passage of life, a struggle, a resistance. For Bertille Bak, the projects are therefore set in a period of time, several months in general, during which she immerses herself in a reality and in everyday life, establishing herself there and making connections with groups who often live in precarious circumstances close to disintegration.

This is how she came to be interested in the inhabitants of an area of Bangkok under threat from a shopping development, staging the implosion of one of the apartment blocks at the end of a revolutionary swansong in morse code light flashes. Or again in the Roma encampment of Ivry-sur-Seine in the Parisian suburbs, their forced silence and the inevitable dissimulation that awaits them.

Together with members of the communities, she elaborates a scenario in which people who are ordinarily constrained to passive resistance, and a sort of invisibility, become the actors of their own stories within their usual environments: the everyday replayed, amplified and redirected blending with the fiction imagined by the artist.

In Saint-Nazaire, where she has been a resident artist at Le Grand Café over the last two years, Bertille Bak has also formulated a locally anchored project that seeks to reveal sometimes hidden realities. She is interested in the shipyards, by the mechanical ballet of the machines, and she wishes to accentuate the people who work on the construction of the most sumptuous cruise ships and the crew on board these sea-going giants. Their community is no longer bound by a common history and is first of all defined through work and the sharing of limited time and space, in which everyone has to find their place.

For this exhibition, the artist has produced a film in which the cruise liner, the recreation of a territorially delimited microcosm in the middle of international waters, is chosen as one of the background elements. With its set of spaces reserved for tourists and forbidden to employees, the cruise ship universe engenders a kind of regimented choreography, where zones reserved for some are forbidden to others.

Entitled "Le tour de Babel [The Tower of Babel]" in reference to these partly invisible communities of different nationalities and individualities, this presentation will very certainly mix objects that evoke the rituals of seamen and women, as well as their voyages and their occasionally absurd  comings and goings.
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Camille Paulhan

Opening on June 5th, 6.30 p.m

LiFE, International Space for Emerging Arts, Saint-Nazaire
Base des sous-marins, Alvéole 14 Boulevard de la Légion d'Honneur 44600 Saint-Nazaire France
Hours
6 June–31 August: Tuesday–Sunday 11am–7pm
1 September–5 October: Wednesday–Sunday 2–7pm
Free entry

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