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8/2/2010

Three Exhibitions

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Lisette Model
Curated by Cristina Zelich

If Lisette Model took up photography as a way of earning a living, it is also true that she always fought for her own subjects, rather than simply carry out the assignments given by editors. She believed that for a photograph to be successful its subject had to be something that “hits you in the stomach.” This could be something familiar or something unfamiliar. For Model, the camera was an instrument for probing the world, a way of capturing aspects of a permanently changing reality that otherwise we would fail to see.

Model always said that she looked but did not judge. Yes, her photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice were published by the left-wing journal Regards, in 1935, but she was not interested exclusively either in the rich or in the poor, and her images are much more about human relations. Her work evinces empathy, curiosity, compassion and admiration, and reflects the photographer’s attraction to voluminous forms, energy and liveliness, to emphatic gesture and expression: the world as stage. The critic Elizabeth McCausland has described Model’s camerawork as expressing “a subconscious revolt against the rules.”

This exhibition of some 120 of Lisette Model’s most representative photographs illustrates the very bold and direct approach to reality that made her one of the most singular proponents of street photography, the particular form of documentary photography that developed in New York during the 1940s, through the camerawork of such as Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava and Weegee.
Alongside the photographs, archive film and sound recordings of Lisette Model will evoke the photographer’s life, and there will be copies of magazines to which she contributed (Regards, Harper’s Bazaar, etc.).

Exhibition organized by Jeu de Paume
and the Fundación MAPFRE
In partnership with A Nous, Azart Photographie, Blast, de l'air, LCI, La Tribune, FIP

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Esther Shalev-Gerz
Curated by Marta Gili

Over three decades Esther Shalev-Gerz has consistently performed a process of unravelling particularities in order to reflect on the ways in which the generalities of history and memory are constructed. Working with a specific place, a certain moment in history, an urgent question, or a shared experience that resonates through history, Shalev-Gerz mines the personal in order to address and interrogate the ways in which the present is understood. Drawing on the fictions of history and speculations on the future, she amplifies the ethics of being invited to speak and being invited to listen. Hers is a powerful artistic practice that complicates how we understand our place in the world.

Shalev-Gerz’s survey exhibition at Jeu de Paume presents an exchange of ideas constructed through acts and encounters of communication. This gathering of works interrogates assumptions and opens the space between understanding and perception, embracing doubt and reframing what operates as a ‘given’ within a particular moment. This is an artistic practice making material the reciprocal relationship between remembering and forgetting, investigating how this affects both the perception of historical experience and the production of historical narrative. Shalev-Gerz’s works operate as paradoxical and incomplete entities that mutate in response to their conditions of display and to how they sit in relation to the world as the slow pace of historical change impacts on conduct and attitudes.

Here at Jeu de Paume this is emphasised as each work is reconfigured through its relationship to others: just like the operations of memory this is a looping non-chronological process. These photographs, objects and videos are grounded in an aesthetics that reflects acts of seeing, pointing to the beauty in the details of everyday perception. With an intense attention to the visual, they use the image to go beyond language in order to communicate the complexities of perception. These works offer not a reflected image of the world, rather one that contests what we think we know. This is not artistic practice that imitates or performs the world, it is of the world: interacting with each work is an experience of immediacy and present-ness. (...)

Lisa Le Feuvre,
"Nothing is written. We all know that. Don’t we".
Extract from the catalogue of the exhibition.

Exhibition organized with the support of the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre
In partnership with A Nous, Blast, de l'air, Evene.fr, mouvement.net, paris-art.com

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Mathilde Rosier : "Find circumstances in the antechamber"
Satellite programm 3 / Curator: Elena Filipovic

Mathilde Rosier makes artworks that are decidedly uncontemporary. Without resorting to nostalgia or passeism, they seem nevertheless out of time. They are also, one could say, out of place, exploring as they do the slippery border between theater and the real, nature and culture. In the film Entr’acte (2003), made in collaboration with Polish artist Paulina Olowska, the colors of the film blend in with the patina of the walls to form the yellowed shades of a bygone era. The film’s “action” has been thus described: “The filmic image, nearly as static as a Baroque tableau, depicts the conservatory of a palace which opens on to a park. In the film, Rosier herself sits at a piano, immersed in playing seemingly unrelated tones.

A young man poses beside her, stretched out motionless in an armchair as if deep in sleep. The simple scene reveals from time to time, the outline of a figure who wanders through the semi-darkness outside.” Recalling the filmic tradition of both Luis Buñuel and Marguerite Duras, the film’s decadent interior opening onto a window of lush nature announces what are recurrent motifs in Rosier’s oeuvre: the nearly immobile and highly oneric scene uses many of art history’s known conventions (tableaux vivant, painterliness, landscape, portraiture) to question the actuality of the “real.” Moreover, in that film, as in so many of her others, a temporality that barely conforms to the conventions of motion pictures makes the image carrier of a tension between its theatricality and its almost suspended action.

Extending her interest in the theatrical, Rosier constructs an elaborate, newly commissioned installation in three parts for the Jeu de Paume: including a film made in the countryside in which a theatrical stage is the backdrop, an exact reconstruction of the film stage in the Jeu de Paume, and various props from the film brought to the actual space of the exhibition. Taking the viewer envers le décor, Rosier’s new film and its reconstructed elements compose a visual troubling between fact and fiction, inside and outside, the exhibition space and theater that leaves the visitor wondering whether the real can be located at all.

Exhibition produced with the support of
the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques (FNAGP),
in collaboration with la Cité internationale des Arts

and in partnership with
Arte, Artpress, Mouvement et mouvement.net,
Nova, parisart.com, Souvenirs from earth.tv

Image: Esther Shalev-Gerz, White-Out : entre l'écoute et la parole (Between Telling and Listening) 2002

Press contact:
Carole Brianchon tel: 01 47031250 e-mail: carolebrianchon@jeudepaume.org

Opening 09 February 2010

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde, 75008 Paris
Hours Tuesday: 12:00 - 21:00
Wednesday - Friday: 12:00 - 19:00
Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 - 19:00
Closed Monday
Admission: 7 €
Concessions: 5 €
Combined ticket for the Concorde and Sully sites: 9 €
Concessions: 6 €

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