CURATED EVENTS ARCHIVE - PARIS
MARCH 2023
DON’T DO THIS TO ME
SUNDAY WITH
CONSTANCE DEBRÉ,
ESTELLE HOY, AND
STEPHANIE LACAVA
Where: After 8 Books
When: March 5, 2023
Don't fall off your chair but please squeeze in on Sunday for a crazy astral conjunction during which three of the most incredible minds and why not bodies of our sick sad times will meet and read and hopefully it won't rain but probably it will be cold but we'll do our best to warm you all up.
More information on the event can be found here.
BOOK LAUNCH: MÊME
LE BRUIT DE LA NUIT
A CHANGÉ
When: March 22, 2023
Violette d'Urso is 23 years old. Même le bruit de la nuit a changé is her first novel.
Anna is still a child when her father dies suddenly. She fills her absence with a few heterogeneous objects, with stories that have been told to her and with her powerful imagination. As a young woman, she understands that she knows very little about the man she has invented as a hero. From a repertoire that belonged to him, she embarks on his footsteps, surveys the cities of Italy, where he was from, and goes back step by step the history of his family. We follow her on this journey where she discovers the thousand lives of her father, some of which are fabulous and others of an inky blackness.
Même le bruit de la nuit a changé reads like an investigation into a passionately romantic man. But it's also a book about orphan childhood and self-construction with lack. The writing and the long time taken to unfold the visible or hidden aspects of a life and a relationship make this a magnificent novel about the love of a daughter for her father.
More information on this title can be found here.
READING GROUP:
IMPOSSIBLE VICTIMS:
MISSING IMAGES AND
ABSENT PERPETRATORS
Where: Villa Vassilieff
When: March 23, 2023
Please join AWARE: Archives of Women Artists for a reading group organised by researcher-in-residence Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe. The reading group will be held in English.
Writing on the absence of images of acts sexual violence carried out by soldiers in the aftermath of war, the theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay stated “When we speak about conditions of systemic violence, we should not look for photographs of or about systemic violence, but explore photographs taken in such zones of systemic violence.” Meaning that evidence may not illustrate or prove an event, but it does not mean it did not happen and that its effects cannot be felt and accounted for. Azoulay calls for a turn away from a forensic conception of the documentary image and towards a participatory and performative understanding of photography as a political and social apparatus. Lingering on the idea of the missing image and archival absence as a site of intensification of interest not a form of disinterest, this reading group pairs Azoulay’s essay with a section from Ian Sinclair’s aural history of the London borough of Hackney.
More information on this title can be found here.
THE TRANSPLANTATION
PROJECT
Founded in 2020, Transplantation is a non-profit socio-cultural initiative, which celebrates, preserves and promotes diasporic creativity through the development of cultural and educational programs (workshops/workshops, exhibitions, editions, residencies, cultural visits…) as well as than a documentary collection unpublished in France. After experimenting in 2020 over 3 months with a gallery in the Montparnasse district, Transplantation continues to draw the outlines of an experimental multidisciplinary art institution, both mobile and intended to perpetuate its presence in Ile-de- France by setting up a third place.
Transplantation considers creative solutions to issues of access to culture, defends the value of diversity, inclusion, and personal development
A multidisciplinary, young team, marked by its cultural and social diversity, which aims to be a nexus of talents from the French peripheries. Transplantation is above all a rhizomatic community that unites around the project and experiments with solutions to the needs raised by this community.
More information on this intiative can be found here.
FEMME, VIE LIBERTÉ
Where: The Musee d’Art
Moderne de Paris,
Palais de Tokyo,
Les Beaux-Arts de Paris,
and the Palais de la Porte Dorée.
When: March 8, 2023 - March 27, 2023
At the initiative of the Musee d’Art Moderne de Paris, four institutions – including the MAM, the Palais de Tokyo, Les Beaux-Arts de Paris & the Palais de la Porte Dorée – are associated with the Femme project Vie Liberté to express their support for Iranian men and women. Since the beginning of the riots in Iran, galleries, art centers, foundations and theaters have been shut down, refusing to normalize the situation. Echoing this, Iranian and international artists, especially graphic designers, support and document this revolutionary movement by creating images, posters, animated videos, or stencils. Drawing on Iranian iconographic culture and international visual language (such ass images of struggles in Cuba, May 68, etc.), these artists combine Persian calligraphy, graphics, and contemporary visual codes to convey images on social networks. The voice of those who risk their lives on a daily basis in Iran.
By displaying and distributing these posters, cultural institutions and structures give visibility to the images of this fight and reaffirm their support for Iranian people in the face of repression, as well as their attachment to the values of emancipation and freedom.
More information on the event can be found here.
MEETING WITH
VALÉRIE BELIN
Where: Jeu de Paume
Auditorium
When: March 28, 2023
The Jeu de Paume bookstore and Atelier EXB editions is hosting a talk by Valérie Belin for the publication of her book L'uncertaine beauté du monde.
Between attraction and rejection, evidence and manipulation, Valérie Belin's photographs reveal a paradoxical and ambiguous universe. What does it show us? A strange seduction, a shoddy luxury, a deep surface, an existential superficiality, a stopped life, a photographic painting. Most of the subjects she chooses are characterized by their plastic beauty: crystalware, Venetian mirrors, vintage cars, perfect bodies, luxuriant bouquets of flowers, exceptional fruits. The injunctions of contemporary society to performance, perfection and luxury cross these bodies pushed to their limits, these sublime faces and these trophy objects. Conversely, some works magnify worthless, ephemeral, degraded or ignored objects: wrecked cars, engines, packets of crisps, carnival masks, luminous signs in the era of LEDs, gadgets made in China.
This work is published on the occasion of her exhibition at the MUba Eugène Leroy in Tourcoing, which will present around thirty series, and will put into perspective the work of a major artist of the contemporary scene.
More information on this event can be found here.
CHÂTEAU DE LA HAUTE
BORDE SPRING 2023
RESIDENCY
Where: Château de la
Haute Borde (CHB)
When: April 2023 - June 2023
CHB aims to host and to foster the creativity of artists of all backgrounds and disciplines. We are a women community and tend to support women artists but everyone is welcome to apply. CHB is a place for community living and positive interaction with nature and each other.
The program is open to both accomplished practitioners and up-and-coming candidates with a high potential for artistic growth. Applicants are evaluated on their practice as well as on the quality and pertinence of a residency project in CHB. We welcome artists, writers, architects, designers, filmmakers, musicians, and researchers, among many other disciplines, to develop, alone or with collaborators, their own large or small scale projects. Residents may take advantage from all the facilities for work and accommodation, from its 10 hectares of land, pasture, a pound, and an unpolluted fauna and flora. Applicants can apply for 1 week to 1 month residencies from April to June 2023.
More information on this residency program can be found here.
A GROUP EXHIBITION –
THE IRRESOLUTE
Where: Le Plateau
(Frac Île-de-France,
Le Plateau)
When: Through April 23, 2023
Photography, film, painting, sculpture, installation and in situ intervention: if they come from a diversity of mediums and techniques, the works of the six artists brought together in the exhibition share between them an appetite for mystery, secrecy, uncertain and the invisible as well as the unspeakable. They make up the framework of a non-linear narrative, dotted or even suspended, offering a plural, open and changing reading.
Simultaneously playing with surface (exterior) and content (interior), transparency and opacity effects, the spaces, objects and bodies they represent are charged with an enigmatic and fictional potential that their disturbing character reinforces. Ambiguous, inaccessible, thus arousing curiosity and the desire to (know) see. Most often pre-existing, found, recovered before being moved, modified, arranged, the elements that constitute them evoke a familiar reality tinged with strangeness and allow a glimpse, by projection, of an off-screen of the exhibition as much as of consciousness and of memory.
More information on this exhibition can be found here.
GERMAINE RICHIER
Where: Centre Pompidou
When: Through June 12, 2023
In homage to Germaine Richier, the first female sculptor exhibited in the National Museum of Modern Art, in 1956, this retrospective brings together nearly 200 works – sculptures, engravings and drawings.
Drawing on previously unpublished research, the exhibition demonstrates the degree to which Germaine Richier occupies a central position in the history of modern sculpture, as a link between Rodin and the first César. Having trained in the tradition of Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle, over a period of little more than 25 years, between the 1930s and her premature passing in 1959, Germaine Richier asserted herself as profoundly original and radical in scarcely more than 25 years. The layout of the exhibition traces her artistic trajectory in chronological order, highlighting the major themes (the human, the animal, myths) that nurtured her practice as a sculptor. It reveals how Richier effected a revitalisation of the figure, forging new images of men and women in the post-war period.
More information on this exhibition can be found here.
FEBRUARY 2023
SOPHIE KOVEL, "A LONG
DURATION OF LOSSES"
Where: Petrine Gallery
When: Through March 11, 2023
A Long Duration of Losses, engages the contested history of the Baba Merzoug (also known as La Consulaire), which is a large cannon removed by the French government from Algeria during the Invasion of Algiers in 1830. Three years later, on July 29, 1833, the cannon was ceremonially erected in Brest, a naval port, where it was titled La Consulaire.
In July of 2012, over 100 years after the Baba Merzoug was taken by France, the Algerian government submitted an official request to have the cannon returned. As of January, 2021, the French government has released a commissioned report that addresses the issue of the monument alongside the larger issue of national memory reconciliation, but has not returned the cannon. In keeping with Kovel’s approach to art making from a critical studies perspective, when asked by Julius Woeste of Petrine Gallery to put together a solo show, Kovel “felt strongly it was an opportunity to address the colonial question” by exploring the history of Baba Merzoug.
More information on the event can be found here.
JUSTINE KURLAND
& MOYRA DAVEY,
"BONDS OF LOVE"
Where: Delpire & Co
When: Through March 18, 2023
Delpire & co presents new work by artists Moyra Davey and Justine Kurland. Titled Bonds of Love, the exhibition is a collaboration, featuring works that speak to multiple, intersecting forms of interdependence, inheritance, devotion, and authority.
Articulating one of the points of departure for the exhibition, Davey reflects on the behavior of pair-bonding in the animals: horses will protect and care for one another, for instance when they stand mane-to-tail to swish flies away from their faces, and humans can also pair-bond with horses through ongoing caretaking rituals and the nurturing of mutual trust. Kurland’s color and black-and-white photographs of Davey with her horse Bella are vulnerable, funny, playful, and somber. The small contact prints are intimate in a way made possible only through the triangulated bonds between Kurland, Davey, and Bella that span artmaking, affinity, and affection.
More information on the event can be found here.
EXHIBITION: "HABIBI,
THE REVOLUTIONS OF LOVE”
Where: Arab World Institute
When: Through March 19, 2023
As in many other parts of the world, struggles are being played out in the Arab world to be able to freely express one's gender identity and sexuality. The popular uprisings of recent years have profoundly upset societies and led to an amplification of LGBTQIA+ activism. Artists, whether they are in the Arab world or in the diasporas, participate in this movement in their own way. They question, testify, fight by creating moving, intimate or exuberant works, of resilience or struggle, sentimental or political, which explore their identities but also their secrets, their emotions, their memories and their dreams. In a world where the presence of LGBTQIA+ is not always accepted or even sanctioned, the exhibition shows the territories explored by these artists.
Through these stories that play with rules and norms, it is also a question of individual emancipation, the freedom of the body, the freedom to exist in one's difference and the freedom to love. In this, the artists exhibited at the IMA go beyond genres, and touch on the universal.
More information on the event can be found here.
MIRIAM CAHN,
“MY SERIAL THOUGHT”
Where: Palais de Tokyo
When: Through May 14, 2023
Miriam Cahn invents new plastic incarnations for what bothers us, what we would like to be able to skip over and yet which faces us, looks us straight in the eye, in a melee from which we cannot escape.
Day after day, within an intense pictorial work that also embraces drawing, photography, film, writing, Miriam Cahn pauses the flow of volatile images of political news and seizes them to testify, resist, embody. Today she is one of the most important artists on the contemporary scene.
The exhibition at Palais de Tokyo is the first major retrospective devoted to the artist’s work in a French institution. It brings together a set of more than two hundred works from 1980 to the present day.
More information on the event can be found here.
JOANNA PIOTROWSKA,
“BETWEEN US”
Where: Le Bal
When: Through May 21, 2023
Le Bal presents the first solo exhibition in France dedicated to the Polish artist Joanna Piotrowska. Her work has been highlighted at the last Venice Biennale and she was the recipient of the Lewis Baltz Research Fun (2018) initiated by Le Bal. For the past ten years, she has been developing a visual world at the crossroads of photography and performance: examining the complex and ambiguous relationships within the familial structure, and aims a mirror at society.
From Joanna Piotrowska’s photographs and videos there emanates an atmosphere of confinement and muted violence. We see tensed-up bodies in artificial postures set in domestic interiors, shaky shelters cobbled together by adults inside their own homes, gestures toward off invisible enemies, but also zoo cages deserted by their occupants. What words cannot express, Piotrowska's deliberate, meticulously composed movements and poses turn into an unusual, body language, at once strange and disturbing.
More information on the event can be found here.
ZANELE MUHOLI
Where: MAISON
EUROPÉENNE DE LA
PHOTOGRAPHIE (MEP)
When: Through May 21, 2023
The MEP is proud to present the first retrospective in France dedicated to Zanele Muholi, the internationally renowned South African photographer and activist whose work documents and celebrates the Black LGBTQIA+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual+) community. This major event, which brings together more than 200 photographs and videos created since the early 2000s as well as numerous archival materials, covers the full breadth of Muholi's career to date, honouring one of the most acclaimed artists working today.
Muholi’s work is created through a collaborative process. They refer to the people they photograph as active “participants” in the work rather than “subjects”; the portrait’s location, clothing and pose are determined together. At times, the artist also turns the camera lens on themself, calling into question the image of Black women in history.
These photographs encourage viewers to address their own misconceptions. Together they create a new lexicon of positive imagery for under- and misrepresented communities, promoting mutual understanding and respect.
More information on the event can be found here.
EDITH DEKYNDT
Where: Pinault Collection
When: Through
December 31, 2023
Following Bertrand Lavier and Anri Sala, Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt will take over the Passage display cases of the Bourse de Commerce. Closely linked to commercialisation and colonisation, the notion of the vitrine arose with industrialisation and the first world’s fairs. It was based on this fact and on the imposing, structural presence of the panoramic canvas in the Rotunda that Edith Dekyndt has constructed her project, which reveals her deep-seated interest in things using the concepts of still life, tableaux vivants, and active objects. The artist is interested in images “as a phenomenon of appearance and resurgence in motion”, as she describes it. Edith Dekyndt uses these subjects to comment on the appearance of the artwork and its status, ultimately to address an ambiguity, a suspension between two states: that of the object and that of the artwork, which she explores to its utmost limits.
More information on the event can be found here.
