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15/10/2012

Manuel Alvarez Bravo / Antoni Muntadas / Filipa Cesar

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Antoni Muntadas
Entre / Between

Jeu de Paume organizes a major exhibition by the internationally recognized artist Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942), one of the early practitioners of conceptual and media art.

The show will survey Muntadas’ prolific career, from the seventies to present days. His art practice spans four decades, in which he has utilized actions, video, photography, multi-media installations, publications, public art, the internet, radio and other media to address key political and social issues of our time. Incorporating in-depth research and astute readings of cultural situations, his incisive works have addressed ideas such as the relationship between public and private, the flows of information along the media landscape, and the inherent power of architecture and other social frameworks.

From the early works of the 1970s that utilized the subsenses, to his 1981 manifesto demanding that audiences consider “What are we looking at?,” to his ongoing series On Translation that wrestles with cultural interpretation, Muntadas has created a vast body of work that frames a discourse on the visible and invisible systems of power in a society dominated by the spectacles of mass media, hyper consumption and ever-advancing technologies.

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Filipa César

“Luta ca caba inda“ (The struggle is not over yet) is as stage from a research project initiated in 2008, but Filipa César’s interest in Guinea-Bissau goes back to an early age and is closely associated with her father’s past. In her first trips to Guinea, César began to unravel the origin of cinema in this West-African country and specially the existence of a cinematic archive, which was in a very derelict state due to both the difficult atmospheric conditions and to the ongoing political instability of the country.

The history of cinema in Guinea Bissau starts during the War for Independence with Portugal (1963-1974) with Amilcar Cabral, the revolutionary leader, sending four young guineanses to the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) to learn how to make cinema. For Cabral, cinema was a way of education and of bring the more then 40 ethnic groups to know each other and join the same aim — Independance. Far from cheap propaganda, it was a strategy to make them aware the struggle, of his revolutionary ideals and taking at the same time the power of one’s own image in order to visually create a new national identity. Cinema was a political tool, a way to create a new collective memory, to write history of the new liberated Guinea with another empowered voice.

The exhibition at the Jeu de Paume is the first stage of her attempt to animate this archive, to continue a struggle that is not over yet. Instead of a historical, archival exhibition César wants the spectator together with her to consider how to think these images assembling facts and fictions, personal narratives and collaborations, “Luta ca caba inda” (the fight is not over) a title appropriated from an unfinished film from the end of 1970’s, included in this corpus, is poetical visual essay about the struggle implied in the act of accessing this images from another time.

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Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Un photographe aux aguets (1902-2002)

Getting away from the stereotypes about exotic Surrealism and the folkloric vision of Mexican culture, this exhibition of work by Manuel Álvarez Bravo at Jeu de Paume offers a boldly contemporary view of this Mexican photographer.

The photographic work done by Manuel Álvarez Bravo (Mexico City, 1902-2002) over his eight decades of activity represent an essential contribution to Mexican culture in the 20th century. His strange and fascinating images have often been seen as the product of an exotic imagination or an eccentric version of the Surrealist avant-garde. This exhibition will go beyond such readings. While not denying the links with Surrealism and the clichés relating to Mexican culture, the selection of 150 photographs is designed to bring out a specific set of iconographic themes running through Álvarez Bravo’s practice: reflections and trompe-l’œil effects in the big city; prone bodies reduced to simple masses; volumes of fabric affording glimpses of bodies; minimalist, geometrically harmonious settings; ambiguous objects, etc.

The exhibition thus takes a fresh look at the work, without reducing it to a set of emblematic images and the stereotyped interpretations that go with them. This approach brings out little-known aspects of his art that turn out to be remarkably topical and immediate. Images become symbols, words turn into images, objects act as signs and reflections become objects: these recurring phenomena are like visual syllables repeated all through his œuvre, from the late 1920s to the early 1980s. They give his images a structure and intentional quality that goes well beyond the fortuitous encounter with the raw magical realism of the Mexican scene. Indeed, Álvarez Bravo’s work constitutes an autonomous and coherent poetic discourse in its own right, one that he patiently built up over the years. For it is indeed time that bestows unity on the imaginary fabric of Álvarez Bravo’s photographs. Behind these disturbing and poetic images, which are like hieroglyphs, there is a cinematic intention which explains their formal quality and also their sequential nature. Arguably, Álvarez Bravo’s photographs could be viewed as images from a film.

The exhibition explores this hypothesis by juxtaposing some of his most famous pictures with short experimental films made in the 1960s, taken from the family archives. The show also features some late, highly cinematic images, and a selection of colour prints and Polaroids. By revealing the photographer’s experiments, this presentation shows how the poetic quality of Álvarez Bravo’s images is grounded in a constant concern with modernity and language. Subject to semantic ambiguity, but underpinned by a strong visual syntax, his photography is a unique synthesis of Mexican localism and the modernist project, and shows how modernism was a multifaceted phenomenon, constructed around a plurality of visions, poetics and cultural backgrounds, and not built on one central practice.

Image: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Bicicleta al cielo (Bicyclette au ciel), 1931 Épreuve gélatino-argentique moderne Collection Colette Urbajtel / Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, s.c. © Colette Urbajtel / Archivo Manuel Álvarez Bravo, s.c.

Press contact:
Carole Brianchon Tel 0033 (0)1 47031322 carolebrianchon@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
Admission: 8,50 € Concessions: 5,50 €

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