calendario eventi  :: 

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8/10/2001

Territoires

Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris

From a seminar...
The exhibition Territories recounts the activities of a seminar led by Jean-François Chevrier, professor of art history at the Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris since 1994.
This weekly seminar is a place for research and debate, open to all, without distinction.
The group of artists and intellectuals that constitute its central core interrogate the relations and the disparities between art and information in contemporary society. They attempt to formulate the requirements of a public art tuned into current events, beyond the routines and the corporatism that rigidifies art and information sectors.
With this aim in mind, each wednesday night for the past six years, artists, economists, sociologists, geographers, town-planners and architects, film-makers, and association directors have approached, from the perspective of their own experiences, the democratic debate's most urgent questions. How do we imagine a common space which preserves its cultural and social heterogeneity and which is not absorbed by communication and the market ?
Two axes of reflection have been progressively sketched out, both in discussion and in the artists' practices. Territory designates a geographic and social situation, between poetics and politics. Metaphorically, each territory can correspond to other territories, to other situations in the world. Witness accounts allow the voice and the history of those who qualify the territory to be heard, while providing it with a subjective tenor.

an exhibition
The stake is to associate the seminar's activities in the common space of the exhibition.
In doing so, the exhibition will offer a response to the question : Must we - and how might we - bring political, social and economic information to bear on the places reserved for art ?
It is not for nothing that the exhibition takes place in a pedagogical institution situated in the center of a metropolis. These two dimensions appear in the exhibition ; the works participate in a process of formation and the center opens onto the periphery. Works by young artists, former students, or current ones mix with those of recognized artists.
The course of the exhibition will make visible two orientations in contemporary artistic culture, two topical movements.
The topicality of modern art's documentary dimension passes through photography as a mode of territorial inquiry, between center and periphery (Patrick Faigenbaum, Mikaël Levin, Marc Pataut, Jeff Wall, the work of the students of Pataut/Faigenbaum's studio) ; through painting and drawing (Yves Bélorgey, Anne-Marie Schneider; Mark Sadler), conceptual art (Kostas Bogdanas) ; through the text and cinema (Fernand Deligny, Amos Gitaï, Marc Pataut, Sophie Haluk). Gérard Dalla Santa, in his photomontages, sets out the daily goings-on of the building site which, through tasks and gestures, reenact the burlesque tradition from Buster Keaton to Jacques Tati. The rhetoric of photojournalism will again be put into play through the prism of autobiographical experience (Gilles Saussier, Yto Barrada). A bringing up to date of Arte Povera, taking off from its historical definition (Giuseppe Penone) in the applied arts (Irene and Christina Hohenbüchler) and textiles in particular (Egle Bogdaniene) plays out a political dialogue with fashion (Majida Khattari) ; in the house as installation (Amal Saade, Florence de Comarmond) at the crossing of territorial intimacy and history (Elin Jakobsdottir). Taking from the work of the pedagogue and poet Fernand Deligny (whose film Le moindre geste is shown in the exhibition) and his resonances with contemporary production, the exhibition will bring to light the psychic and infra-linguistic dimensions of territory (Deligny, Gego, Marina Ballo-Charmet, Anne-Marie Schneider, Lise Terdjman and Elisabeth Gerl).

The majority of works are being shown for the first time, conceived as they were in the seminar process, and created especially for the occasion. The organization of the rooms will have to translate a number of diverse territories, moving from the strictly documented geographical definition to the imaginary reconstruction, with a deliberate position concerning the spatial division of the ground floor and a more fluid use of space on the second floor.

A film program on the theme of the character elaborated by the seminar will run parallel to the exhibition (with films of Amos Gitaï, Jean-Louis Comoli, Rithy Panh).

with a magazine
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, made up of the first five issues of Territoires en revue, published since May 1999.
This magazine takes stock of the seminar's activities and the project's evolution through four key words : country, people, foreigness, world.
The first issue recaps the history of the seminar since 1994, tells the story of Fernand Deligny's work with autistic children in the Cevennes region in 1967, as well as presents a visit with the Israeli film-maker Amos Gitai, who comes from Haifa.
The second issue, dated October 1999, is conceived as a multiple voiced "country diary." It presents three territories in context and three author-witnesses : Marc Pataut in Tulle, Véronique Nahoum-Grappe in Kosovo, and Majida Khattari in Casablanca.
Issue number 3, which appeared in April 2000, is centered on photography and the question of popular culture; it contains a "history in two biographies" by Antonio Gramsci and Elio Vitorrini, historian Joan Roca and photographer Patrick Faigenbaum's inquiry about a neighborhood (the Besos) lying on the outskirts of Barcelona; work and reflection on reporting by Gilles Saussier, Yto Barrada, Gérard Dalla Santa, and Frédéric Delesalle.
Issue number 4 came out in October 2000. It presented the work of Egle and Kostas Bogdanai, both artists and couple, alongside a feature about Jeff Wall in Vancouver.
There was also a section given over to contemporary cinema.

The exhibition will be taken up, developed and adapted elsewhere (Barcelona, Vienna, Glasgow).
The seminar activities will continue at the Ensba, but also in a new exhibition and meeting space that Jean-François Chevrier intends to open in Paris during the year 2002.

Curators :
Jean-François Chevrier with Sandra Alvarez de Toledo
Installation conception :
François Andrieux and Luc Baboulet

Open everyday from 1 P.M to 7 P.M, except monday
Entrance :
25 F/3,81 - et 15 F/2,29

Catalogue comprises 5 issues of Territoires en revue, with colour illustrations

Exhibitions coordinator and public relations manager :
Laurence Maynier
Tél. : 01 47 03 50 74, Fax : 01 47 03 50 88
Exhibitions coordinator :
Sophie Kaplan
Tél. : 01 47 03 50 72, Fax : 01 47 03 50 88,
E-mail: sophie.kaplan@ensba.fr

Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts
14 rue Bonaparte, 75006 Paris
Tél : 01 47 03 50 00
Fax : 01 47 03 50 80

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