Jeu de Paume
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Laurent Grasso / Eva Besnyo / Rosa Barba
dal 21/5/2012 al 22/9/2012
Tuesday: 11am - 9pm Wednesday - Sunday: 11am - 7pm

Segnalato da

Carole Brianchon



 
calendario eventi  :: 




21/5/2012

Laurent Grasso / Eva Besnyo / Rosa Barba

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Grasso has conceived his exhibition around the recurring concerns of his work, in which the relation to time and temporality becomes uncertain, as is the origin of the objects he creates. In Barba's installations, such as Invisible Act (2010), we are confronted with the continual transposition of material into image and back again. Besnyo's first retrospective exhibition, showing ca. 120 vintage prints, aims to introduce the public to the life and work of this emigrant.


comunicato stampa

Eva Besnyö

The Sensuous Image

In 1930, when Eva Besnyö arrived in Berlin at the age of only twenty, a certificate of successful apprenticeship from a recognised Budapest photographic studio in her bag, she had made two momentous decisions already: to turn photography into her profession and to put fascist Hungary behind her for ever.

Like her Hungarian colleagues Moholy-Nagy, Kepes and Munkacsi and — a little later — Capa, Besnyö experienced Berlin as a metropolis of deeply satisfying artistic experimentation and democratic ways of life. She had found work with the press photographer Dr. Peter Weller and roamed the city with her camera during the day, searching for motifs on construction sites, by Lake Wannsee, at the zoo or in the sports stadiums, and her photographs were published — albeit, as was customary at the time, under the name of the studio. Besnyö’s best-known photo originates from those years: the gypsy boy with a cello on his back — an image of the homeless tramp that has become familiar all over the world.

Eva Besnyö had a keen political sense, evidenced by the fact that she fled in good time from anti-Semitic, National Socialist persecution, leaving Berlin for Amsterdam in autumn 1932. Supported by the circle surrounding woman painter Charley Toorop, filmmaker Joris Ivens and designer Gerrit Rietveld, Besnyö — meanwhile married to cameraman John Fernhout — soon enjoyed public recognition as a photographer. An individual exhibition in the internationally respected Van Lier art gallery in 1933 made her reputation in the Netherlands practically overnight. Besnyö experienced a further breakthrough with her architectural photography only a few years later: translating the idea of functionalist “New Building” into a “New Seeing”.

In the second half of the 30s, Besnyö demonstrated an intense commitment to cultural politics, e.g. at the anti-Olympiad exhibition “D-O-O-D” (De Olympiade onder Diktatuur) in 1936; in the following year, 1937, she was curator of the international exhibition “foto ’37” in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

The invasion of German troops in May 1940 meant that as a Jew, Eva Besnyö was compelled to go into hiding underground. She was attracted to a world view shaped by humanism in the post-war years, and her photographs became stylistically decisive for neo-Realism and immensely suitable for the moralising exhibition, the “Family of Man” (1955).

The mother of two children, she had experienced the classic female conflict between bringing up children and a profession career as a crucial and very personal test. Consequentially, Besnyö became an activist in the Dutch women’s movement “Dolle Mina” during the 70s, making a public commitment to equal rights and documenting demonstrations and street protests on camera.

This first retrospective exhibition, showing ca.120 vintage prints, aims to introduce the public to the life and work of this emigrant and “Berliner by choice”, a convinced cosmopolitan and the “Grande Dame” of Dutch photography. “Like many other talents, that of Eva Besnyö was lost to Germany and its creative art as a direct consequence of the National Socialists’ racial mania.” (Karl Steinorth, DGPh, 1999)

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Rosa Barba

"Back Door Exposure"
Satellite 5 / Curator: Filipa Oliveira

Cinema is Rosa Barba’s language, she creates it, analyses it, researches it and dissects it separating its different parts – such as words, soundtracks, images, and light - and (re)presents them, sometimes isolated from each other. Film, with its limitations as a medium, is transformed into a sculptural and textual object. There is a constant transposition, a continuous flow between being a medium and being the art object, between being content and being form. Rosa Barba is very interested in how film, as a document, relates to reality, how history itself relates to reality. In this sense her films inhabit what seems to be a doc-fiction discourse, questioning itself constantly.

In her installations, such as Invisible Act (2010), we are confronted with the continual transposition of material into image and back again. The projectors become a central moment of the installation, surpassing their ontological purpose and becoming closer to kinetic machines or sci-fi experiments. This idea of exploring the boundaries of the medium is at the core of this artist’s practice.

Rosa Barba, Italian, born in 1972, lives in Berlin.

> The Fondation nationale des arts graphiques et plastiques (FNAGP) contributes to the production of the works of the Satellite program.

Satellite 5 is organized in collaboration with
The Fondation Calouste Gulbekian, the Instituto Camões
and the Embassy of Portugal in France.

Exhibition in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zurich
and the Bergen Kunsthall.

The exhibition is organized with support of the
Dena Foundation for Contemporary Art
and the Institut Culturel Italien, Paris

In partnership with art press, paris-art.com and Radio Nova.

Acknowledgments to Sandeman and Ferreira Porto.

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Laurent Grasso

Uraniborg

Laurent Grasso has conceived his exhibition at Jeu de Paume around the recurring concerns of his work, in which the relation to time and temporality becomes uncertain, as is the origin of the objects he creates. His exhibition devices always change the architecture of the host space, and his pieces challenge the viewer’s perceptions with situations that, while well documented in history or mythology, also contain an undefined aesthetic and fictional potential. Laurent Grasso apprehends reality in terms of its limits, invoking things that are known or familiar, and questioning problematics at the forefront of contemporary experience.

In his exploration of the notions of space and temporality, Laurent Grasso loves the idea of “creating a false historical memory,” with the idea that in a century from now it will still be impossible to date his works — or even more so. He creates a false archaeology of the future. His work is a journey into time which goes well beyond the present.

For this exhibition, Laurent Grasso deploys video, sculpture, painting, drawing and apparatus to explore four ideas: observation of the heavens, surveillance, “political ghosts” and deceptive beauty.

His work on primitive fears lies behind works such as Les Oiseaux (The Birds, 2008) and Polair (2007). Control and surveillance devices are evoked in the film Untitled (2009), shot near Abu Dhabi, and in The Silent Movie (2010), in which the artist films the military fortifications along the Mediterranean coast near Cartagena. Finally, Grasso is also interested in the way in which power, omnipresent yet invisible, always generates a diffuse sense of fear. This is the theme he explores in the new piece produced by Jeu de Paume for this exhibition, in which architecture, the dispositif and the voice play a dominant role.

Laurent Grasso manipulates the image, often intentionally, by imposing unique and unusual perspectives on his subject. At the heart of his aesthetic sensibility is the idea of a constantly shifting perspective:

“The idea is to construct a floating viewpoint, thereby creating a sense of discrepancy with regard to reality. We move from space to another, which is also how we produce states of consciousness.”

Image: Laurent Grasso, Untitled, 2009 © Laurent Grasso / ADAGP, Paris

Press contact:
Carole Brianchon Tel 0033 (0)1 47031322 carolebrianchon@jeudepaume.org

Opening May 22nd, 6 pm

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde 75008 Paris
Hours Tuesday: 11am – 9pm
Wednesday - Sunday: 11am – 7pm Closed Monday, including public holidays
Admission: 8,50 € Concessions: 5,50 €

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