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2/6/2014

Three exhibitions

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Kati Horna

In collaboration with the Museo Amparo in Puebla (Mexico), the Jeu de Paume is presenting the first retrospective of the work of photographer Kati Horna (Szilasbalhási, Hungary, 1912–Mexico, 2000), showing more than six decades of work in Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. Kati Horna, a photographer whose adopted homeland was Mexico, was one of a generation of Hungarian photographers (including André Kertész, Robert Capa, Eva Besnyö, László Moholy-Nagy, Nicolás Muller, Brassaï, Rogi André, Ergy Landau and Martin Munkácsi) forced to flee their country due to the conflicts and social upheaval of the 1930s.
Cosmopolitan and avant-garde, Kati Horna was known above all for her images of the Spanish Civil War, produced at the request of the Spanish Republican government between 1937 and 1939. Her work is characterised by both its adherence to the principles of Surrealist photography and her ver y personal approach to photographic reportage.

This major retrospective helps to bring international recognition to this versatile, socially committed, humanist photographer, highlighting her unusual artistic creativity and her contribution to photojournalism. It offers a comprehensive overview of the work of this ar tist, who started out as a photographer in Hungary at the age of 21, in the context of the European avant-garde movements of the 1930s: Russian Constructivism, the Bauhaus school, Surrealism and German Neue Sachlichkeit. Her vast output, produced both in Europe and Mexico, her adopted country, is reflected in a selection of over 150 works – most of them vintage prints, the vast majority of them unpublished or little known.

In Mexico, Kati Horna formed a new family with the émigré artists Remedios Varo, Benjamin Péret, Emerico ‘Chiki’ Weisz, Edward James and, later on, Leonora Carrington. In parallel with her reportages, she took different series of photographs of visual stories, extraordinary creations featuring masks and dolls, motifs that began to appear in her work in the 1930s.
Kati Horna also became the great portraitist of the Mexican literary and artistic avant-garde; her visionary photographs captured the leading artists in Mexico during the 1960s, such as Alfonso Reyes, Germán Cueto, Remedios Varo, Pedro Friedeberg, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Mathias Goeritz and Leonora Carrington.

The exhibition is divided into five periods: her beginnings in Budapest, Berlin and Paris between 1933 and 1937; Spain and the Civil War from 1937 to 1939; Paris again in 1939; then Mexico. The exhibition also presents a number of documents, in particular the periodicals that she contributed to during her travels between Hungary, France, Spain and Mexico. The works come from the Archivo Privado de Fotografía y Gráfica Kati y José Horna, the Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica de España, Salamanca, the Museo Amparo, Puebla, as well as private collections.

Curators
Ángeles Alonso Espinosa, anthropologist and curator at the Museo Amparo, Puebla (Mexico), and José Antonio Rodríguez, historian of images and independent curator.

Exhibition organised by the Museo Amparo (Puebla) in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume.

This exhibition was realized with the help of the Spanish Embassy in Paris; AMEXCID (Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation); CONACULTA (Mexican National Council for Culture and Arts) and the Instituto Cultural de México in Paris.

As part of the Latin American
and Caribbean Week.

Media partners
A Nous Paris, Marie Claire, Time Out Paris, Stylist

With thanks to the Hôtel Napoléon Paris Champs Elysées

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Oscar Muñoz
Protographs

Born in 1951 in Popayán (Colombia), Oscar Muñoz is regarded as one of the country’s most important contemporary artists, whilst also garnering attention on the international art scene. A graduate of the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Cali, he has built up over a period of four decades a body of work whose images deal with the realm of memory, loss and the precarious nature of human life. Muñoz’s work defies systematic classification because he works in so many different media: photography, printmaking, drawing, installations, video and sculpture.

“Protographs“ (a term coined to evoke the instant just before or just after that split-second when the photographic image is captured and frozen for ever) presents his major series grouped by theme. These themes poetically and metaphorically juxtapose Muñoz’s own past and the different material states of the image. For example, he combines the dissolution, deterioration or disintegration of the image with the inherent fragility of memory and the impossibility of making time stand still; or the image’s evaporation and transformation with the tension between rationality and chaos in our urban societies. Finally, in the main part of his work, he creates ephemeral images that, as they disappear, invite the spectator to share in an experience that is simultaneously rational and sensual.

Oscar Muñoz began his career in the 1970s in Cali in a period when a whirlwind of cultural and cross-disciplinary activity saw the emergence of a generation of writers, photographers and filmmakers who today play a leading role in the contemporary art scene (with Carlos Mayolo, Luis Ospina, Fernell Franco and Andrés Caicedo to name but a few). At that time, Muñoz was drawing with charcoal on large-format supports presenting a cast of sad and sometimes sordid characters with a deep emotional charge.
The main characteristics of his work emerged at an early stage. These include a profound and tireless interest in social questions, an original approach to materials, the use of photography as an aid to memory and the exploiting of the dramatic possibilities afforded by the play of shadow and light in defining the image. Moreover, the artist developed a phenomenological approach to minimalism by insisting on the relationship between the artwork, the spectator and the surrounding exhibition space.

In the mid-1980s, Oscar Muñoz moved away from traditional artistic methods and began to experiment with innovative processes that created a real interactive exchange with the spectator. This was the time of a radical reassessment of his artistic practices, whether drawing, printmaking, or photography, and a questioning of the relationship between the artwork and its surroundings. He abandoned traditional formats and techniques, whilst preserving something of their roots and wellsprings, to investigate ephemerality, highlighting the very essence of the materials themselves and their poetic associations. His use of the fundamental elements – water, air and fire – refers to the processes, the cycles and the transcendental manifestations of life, our very existence and death itself. “My work attempts to understand why the past and the present are so full of violent acts”, says the artist. By choosing to use a diverse selection of media and to apply innovative and unique processes, Oscar Muñoz blurs the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

The “Protographs” exhibition showcases a career that has lasted nearly forty years. It presents series of works grouped around the artist’s major themes, starting with his works on paper and his series of large format hyperrealist drawings in charcoal (1976–1981) – bearing witness to his deep interest in social context – and the drawings and engravings that he started making in the 1980s, which marked the relinquishing of paper for an exploration of unconventional materials and processes (printing on damp plastic, the use of sugar and coffee, etc.); continuing with his experiments in the 1990s and 2000s on the stability of the image and its relationship to the processes of memory; and including his latest works (2009–2014), characterised by a continual process of appearance and disappearance, including a new work produced specifically for the exhibition.


Curators
José Roca and María Wills Londoño

Exhibition co-produced by the
Museo de Arte del Banco de la República (Bogotá)
and the Jeu de Paume (Paris).

As part of the Latin American
and Caribbean Week.

Media partners
A Nous Paris, Marie Claire, Time Out Paris, Stylist

With thanks to the Hôtel Napoléon Paris Champs Elysées

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Kapwani Kiwanga
Maji Maji
Satellite Programme 7.
Curator: Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Research in anthropology, literature and archives lies at the heart of Kapwani Kiwanga’s work, which is informed by Afrofuturism, the anti-colonial struggle and its memory, belief systems, and vernacular and popular culture, as well as different cultural ways of approaching the invisible, intangible aspects of the magical and the supernatural. In her films, installations and performances, which revolve around notions of belief and its relationship to “knowledge”, Kapwani Kiwanga employs documentary modes of representation, various material sources, and testimonies of a subjective as well as a quasi scientific kind. She is also interested in different approaches to embodiment in art, most notably in her Afrogalactica trilogy project (2011–ongoing), for which she has invented the character of an anthropologist from the future, a protagonist who ranges across vast fields of knowledge relating to Afrofuturism as a historical movement, hybrid genders and African astronomy.

Kapwani Kiwanga’s exhibition “Maji Maji” draws on the historical account of the Maji Maji War, which took place between 1905 and 1907 and was one of the largest uprisings on the African continent at the beginning of the twentieth century. The revolt against German rule was initiated by a spiritual medium named Kinjiketile, also known by the name Bokero. After being possessed by the spirit Hongo, he attracted a large following, and distributed sacred water, or maji, that was to protect them by transforming German bullets into water. Maji Maji fighters’ belief in the supernatural was a means to galvanise the insurrection, which was fundamentally a belief in the possibility of creating another social order. However, the maji did not safeguard them and many African lives were lost.

In her exhibition, Kapwani Kiwanga focuses on the voids present in the living memory of the Maji Maji War and its material traces, as well as the supernatural imagination that encompasses and contextualises it. As she says, voids are felt often because the presence of other things marks their absence. As in the question of void and presence, the supernatural also has a dual capacity to protect or assault. Kapwani adopts an empathic approach to the subject, making the spectators feel and imagine these ungraspable, inaccessible, vanished voids. The absence is thus made into a constituent element of a story being retold, through evoking the power of the oral, of the broken and fragmented. Historical and contemporary ways of studying something frequently imply dissecting, placing into boxes and labelling. In so doing, one creates categories and meaning, filing and storing them in an ordered system. Another approach is to narrate it through myth and anecdotes, recollection and hearsay. By conceiving the exhibition as a subjective archive through which the artist queries the act of compiling, organising and categorising, she mixes a narrative, and subjective ordering that rejects the illusion of totality or exhaustiveness. The shelving system in the exhibition space thus leaves empty space for the presence of the immaterial and the phantoms of absent pieces, while proposing found objects and videos as traces of the artist’s research.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez

Curator
Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, independent curator

Partners
The Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques contributes to the production of works in the Satellite program.
The Jeu de Paume is a member of the Tram and d.c.a networks, association française de développement des centres d’art.

The exhibition is realized in partnership with the Centre culturel canadien.

Media Partners
art press, ParisArt, Souvenirs from earth TV, Radio Nova

Contact
Annabelle Floriant
T. 00 33 (0)1 47 03 13 22
M. 00 33 (0)6 42 53 04 07
annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde - 75008 Paris
Tuesday: 11am – 9pm
Wednesday - Sunday: 11am – 7pm
Closed Monday (including public holidays),
December 25th, January 1st and May 1st
ADMISSION
> Admission: 10 €
> Concessions: 7,50 €
— Visitors under 26
— Seniors (65 and over)
— Students
— Teachers
— Large Family and Paris Family cardholders
— SACD and AGESSA cardholders
— Jaeger-LeCoultre employees
— Friends of the BAL
> Free admission to the exhibitions of the Satellite Programme

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