CURATED EVENTS - PARIS
Self Portrait and Other Ruins: The Cinema of Louise Bourque
Louise Bourque's œuvre is an irreducible totality in which personal and family secrets hide behind layers of photochemical emulsion. It offers an obsessive world that is both visceral and oneiric, dotted with repetitive motifs. Death and birth, fertility and decomposition. These oppositions run through Bourque's work and find an echo in her practice; she creates out of images that are "dead" (unused, discarded, forgotten) and buried (in the garden of the familial house).
Louise Bourque is a key figure of the North American experimental film scene. She lived and taught filmmaking in the United States before returning to Canada in the 2010s. In 2021, a retrospective of her films was presented at the Cinémathèque Québécoise, accompanied by an installation. This event will be the first monographic screening of her work in France.
Program
Self Portrait Post Mortem (2002, 35mm, color, sound, 2' 30)
Fissures (1999, 16mm, color, sound, 2' 30)
Just Words (1991, DCP, color, sound, 10' 00)
Jours En Fleurs (2003, 35mm, color, sound, 4' 59)
Imprint (1997, 16mm, color, sound, 14' 00)
Remains (2011, 16mm, color, sound, 4' 50)
Going Back Home (2000, 35mm, color, sound, 1' 00)
L'éclat Du Mal, The Bleeding Heart Of It (2005, 35mm, color, sound, 8' 00)
A Little Prayer (H-E-L-P) (2011, 35mm, color, sound, 8' 00)
Help (2009, 35mm, b&w, silent, 1' 00)
Bye Bye Now (2022, 35mm, color-b&w, sound, 8' 27)
More information can be found here.
Street Art & Féminisme
Feminists in the City takes you on the trail of feminism through the streets of the village district of Butte-aux-Cailles. We will discover the history of the neighborhood, the movement for gender equality, and that of women and/or feminist street artists.
Committed street artists regularly invite themselves to our visits, for a live collage!
More information can be found here.
Paris Ass Book Fair / Palais de Tokyo
The sixth edition of Paris Ass Book Fair will take place 17-19 May 2024 at Palais de Tokyo. Creators, authors, art lovers and collectives coming from all over the world will come together to present books, zines and every kind of editions.
Paris Ass Book Fair was born from the desire to give an important place to marginal and untimely sensibilities, desires and aspirations, and to affirm a joyful approach to art and publishing, a taste for provocation and the absurd, a joy in stimulating minds and bodies.
Every year since 2017, the fair has brought together dozens of artists, booksellers, publishers and zinesters around this commitment: to show printed matter as a medium in its own right, a vehicle for creativity, individual and collective expression. The publications and projects presented at the fair adopt formats at the crossroads of many fields: fanzines, artists’ books, magazines, clothing, multiples, novels, essays, posters, etc.
The fair is curated with the constant concern of privileging those who have limited access to the market and whose creations are not found in the usual distribution circuits; as well as those who give voice to experiences, questionings, desires, which go against the majority norms, and which can open our eyes. As a consequence, the fair gives a very large place to LGBTQI+ people and offers a platform to their questioning and expressions. It is about contributing to making our society more fair and inclusive—while having fun.
A place for sharing tastes and ideas, the fair proposes a programme of talks and performances, as well as special projects.
More information can be found here.
I PROMISE I’LL COME AND RESCUE YOU
Galerie Anne Barrault is delighted to host Vimala Pons’ first solo exhibition.
A multi-media and trans-disciplinary artist, Vimala Pons has a background in competitive sport, art history, cinema and music.
Known for her performative shows as well as her chiseled career as a film actress, all her work as an artist is based on emotional macro-introspection and the manifestation of imbalance in all its forms.
I PROMISE I’LL COME AND RESCUE YOU is a series of 40 videos, 2 minutes long each. These are short sequences shot from a subjective point of view. These images, retrieved from an online image bank, create a dialogue between mental and visual loops, mantra, self-persuasion and obsession.
For her first exhibition, Vimala Pons worked in close collaboration with Danse Musique Rhône-Alpes for the original music composition, mix and image editing.
For more information read here.
Chloe Bensahel
Chloe Bensahel is a Franco-American artist who combines performance, weaving and multimedia in order to shed light on the links between language and identity. A graduate of Parsons School in New York, she began her career as an assistant to Sheila Hicks as well as working alongside textile artists in Kyoto. Between 2016 and 2018, she undertook a number of residencies in Australia (Australian Tapestry Workshop,) Japan (Awagami Paper Factory) and the United States (Halcyon Arts Lab), before moving to France where she worked as an artist-in-residence at the Mobilier National.
During a residency at the Manufacture de Beauvais in partnership with the Google Arts and Culture Foundation, she benefited from the expertise of the lissiers, specialist technicians who both prepare the looms for weaving and make the tapestries. This experience enabled her to add a new dimension to French tapestry by weaving a material which, when touched, activates sounds, lights and other connected devices. Her technique introduces a new way of telling stories, whether through the gentleness of a caress or the vitality of dance. Her most recent work that will be shown within this exhibition, turns to plants such as nettles and invasive weeds to imagine how the history of a place might be told through its flora.
More information can be found here.
Pina Bausch––Sweet Mambo
In ‘Sweet Mambo’ six women are running the show. They are elegant and sensual, and reveal their inner torment and hope, their feelings of desire, fury and disappointment. Surely a woman feels lonely after so many missed opportunities and encounters. The second-last work by Pina Bausch, with three men presenting facts, shows how a woman sees personal relationships, seduction and desire, in a highly philosophical treatise on the obsessive quest for happiness that is both comic and tragic. Ranging from sensitivity to laughter and sincerity, with lucid awareness of our fragility, Pina Bausch presents a delightful portrayal of our illusions and of our need for others.
More information can be found here.
Ces corps qui nous traversent (These bodies that pass through us)
These bodies that cross us is a hybrid exhibition which invites us to reconsider our way of being in the world. It invites you to discover the work of seven women artists Charlotte Gautier Van Tour, Zineb Mezzour, Chloé Milos Azzopardi, Delphine Mogarra, France-Lan Lê Vu, Victoria Tanto, Clara Tournay,
Between rationalism and wonder, the works resonate with their environment, some with the others. They show us the shape of the world and lead us to think about the place we occupy in our biosphere.
More information can be found here.
Deborah Stratmam : Le monde a commencé par un oui
The Jeu de Paume is devoting its spring cinema programme to American artist and director Deborah Stratman, with the screening of a selection of her films in the auditorium.With a rich back catalogue of some thirty films, at the crossroads between documentary, essay, and experimental cinema, and the most well-known part of an artistic practice that also extends to drawing, photography, sculpture, publishing, and installation, this dense and captivating body of work explores how questions of power, control, knowledge, and belief play out in physical environments. A lover of science, Stratman addresses a multiplicity of subjects: surveillance, freedom, patriotism, chasms, levitation, birds of prey, comets, evolution, extinction, and faith. She draws on vast systems of knowledge, including acoustics, geology, and astrophysics, to create poetically rigorous and politically timely works that transcend knowledge and veer towards magic.
More information can be found here.
Mati Diop : Dahomey
Cinéma du réel 46th edition will open with the French premiere of Dahomey by Mati Diop.
November 2021. 26 royal treasures of the Kingdom of Dahomey are about to leave Paris to return to their country of origin, the present-day Republic of Benin. Along with thousands of others, these artefacts were plundered by French colonial troops in 1892. But what attitude to adopt to these ancestors’ homecoming in a country that had to forge ahead in their absence? The debate rages among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi.
More information can be found here.
Soleil de la conscience
Soleils de la Conscience, named after Édouard Glissant's Soleil de la Conscience, is a poetic cultural event based on the figure of Zétwal and his incredible project. Placing poetic expression at the heart of the event, it is based on the idea that poetry embodies a magical and emancipating force. Its ambition is to shine a spotlight on the current voices of Afro-Caribbean poetry, to offer a space for revaluation and rich expression. The second part of the evening, Kouté sé soley la, is a moment of oral declamation. This poetic moment is accompanied by an exhibition dedicated to emerging French-speaking artists from the West Indies, whose visual work unfolds multiple imaginations and experiences.
The "Soleils de la Conscience" zine published as part of this project will be available for purchase. It brings together texts by some twenty poets from the French West Indies and Guyana.
More information can be found here.
South American Women's Film Week
The second edition of the South American Women's Film Week is taking place at the Reflet Médicis, in honor of International Women's Rights Week. The aim is to showcase the work of all these South American women directors. Documentary, fiction and short films will be on show at the Reflet Médicis all this week.
More information can be found here.
Vera Molnar
Vera Molnár (born Gács; 5 January 1924 – 7 December 2023) was a Hungarian media artist who lived and worked in France. Molnár is widely considered to have been a pioneer of computer art and generative art and was also one of the first women to use computers in her art practice. Born in Hungary, she studied aesthetics and art history at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts. In the 1940s and 1950s, she created non-representational paintings. By 1959 she was making combinatorial images; in 1968, she would use a computer to create her first algorithmic drawings.
In the 1960s, she founded two groups in France concerned with the use of technology within the arts: the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel and Art et Informatique. In 1976, her first solo exhibition in the gallery of the London Polytechnic took place.
More information can be found here.
Coming Soon while waiting for tomorrow
The exhibition looks at our relationship and ways of being towards what is ahead, eludes and awaits us. Between predictions, oracles, systems of anticipation and capitulations, the exhibition mixes commissions to contemporary artists with historical objects.
Taking up artist Barbara Kruger's phrase, "the future belongs to those who can see it", Coming Soon addresses what our conception of the future says of present times; how our hopes, our pessimism, our desires and anxieties manifest themselves; how different ways of beings and attitudes translate.
The future is a time-space in constant evolution, which all don’t get to inhabit under the same terms and conditions. Engaging us to think urgently about the future through different understandings of togetherness, Coming Soon focuses on possible paths of writing, imagining, creating and embodying collective outcomes.
Bas Jan Ader · John Akomfrah · Chino Amobi · Clovis Bataille · Nina Beier · Neïl Beloufa · Stéphanie Brossard · Leonora Carrington · Xinyi Cheng · Alexandru Chira · Mimosa Echard · Cécile B. Evans * · Cerith Wyn Evans · Johann Heinrich Füssli · Marguerite Humeau · Christine Sun Kim · Emma Kunz · Romany Marie · Nggamdu.org · Philippe Parreno · Benoît Piéron · Bridget Polk · Heji Shin · Lisa Signorini * · The Simpsons · Diamond Stingily · Martine Syms · Sung Tieu · Rirkrit Tiravanija · Nora Turato · Jules Verne · Georges Widener. And archaeological objects from the Louvre.
* New productions supported by Lafayette Anticipations
More information can be found here.
Hélène Giannecchini: Literary workshop
The CND is hosting and supporting a writing residency organised by the Département of Seine-Saint-Denis: "Écrivain-e-s en Seine-Saint-Denis". The residency will allow writer Hélène Giannecchini to immerse herself in the resources of the CND and in dialogue with the many members of the public and players at the venue. Her writing project will be the basis for a lecture and performance on the notion of the queer body. Dance has been one of the preferred means of expressing these bodies, which are sometimes regarded as out of the ordinary. The ten months of the residency will be devoted to writing the text and meeting and exchanging ideas with the public at the CND many mediation activities are planned: lectures, debates, meetings, writing workshops, etc.
During the residency, Hélène Giannecchini will be holding a literary workshop once a month.
How to work successfully, how to organise your time, how to find a residency, how to write an application, how to do a workshop, how to prepare a manuscript, how to organise your proof-reading, how to find economic strategies for writing, how to get an office, etc.? Writing is not just a question of inspiration: it is also made up of material realities. As part of her residency at the Centre National de la Danse, writer Hélène Giannecchini has set up a monthly office to answer all the questions we don't dare ask.
More information can be found here.
A Tribute To Amy Halpern
Amy Halpern (1953-2022) occupies a singular place in the history of American experimental cinema. She was a key figure who took part in many legendary film shoots and artistic projects, a tireless organizer who co-founded or directed several filmmakers’ associations, and, at the same time, an original and prolific filmmaker in her own right, whose works remained, until very recently, in the shadow of her contemporaries.
Born in New York, Halpern devoted herself to contemporary dance from an early age. In the early 1970s, as a student at Binghamton University, she rubbed shoulders with Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, and Paul Sharits, as well as Larry Gottheim and Ken Jacobs who became close friends and collaborators. Later, while studying at UCLA, she worked as a gaffer (a profession she would continue to exercise for years) on the shoots of Charles Burnett and Julie Dash, important figures in the movement of Black American filmmakers known as the “LA Rebellion”. In the second half of the decade, she became close to the Angeleno experimental scene as a programmer and performer. Perceptive viewers will recognize her face in Chick Strand’s Soft Fiction (1979) and, more fleetingly, in Pat O’Neill’s Water and Power (1989).
More information can be found here.
XIV – Gourmandes
Joyful sexuality, overflowing appetites, bodies exposed and celebrated as they are: the Gourmandes exhibition offers an unashamed exploration of the carnal feminine, through a light, pop prism. A celebration of pleasures perceived as guilty, as seen and experienced by women.
More information can be found here.
When books turn to dust, what will be the center of your love?
AWARE and Union Quoi? International·e, an artist collective associated with the documentation center at Villa Vassilieff, are pleased to invite you to four original reading workshops during the 2023-2024 academic year. We’d like to revisit the writings of the authors we love in a different way, weaving them together before their memory is lost. The mesh of interlacing threads would be ways of circulating their words and thoughts beyond the margins that frame the fabric of their language; of disseminating them through our pores, of decentering their point of gravity, beyond the warp and weft of their impression.
By asking ourselves how we understand our presence, here and now, and how, over time, we navigate the texts of these authors, what memory we forge of them, beginning to trace other constellations and to see the words drawn by our sensibility to the trembling pages we hold. The uncertainty of the future towards which we are moving drives us to reinvention: as inheritors of books, how do we read? How are we sensitive to the words left by our elders? To their thoughts? How can we move forward with them? How can we feel differently? How do we write? How do we “understand together”?
February 14, 2024 – When books turn to dust, what will be the center of your love? (based on texts by Qiu Miaojin & other authors), conceived and led by Yeongseo Jee
More information can be found here.
Tina Modotti: The Eye of Revolution
Jeu de Paume pays tribute to Tina Modotti (1896-1942) through a major exhibition, the largest ever devoted to the photographer and political activist of Italian origin in Paris.
Tina Modotti (born Assunta Adelaide Luigia Modotti Mondini, August 16/17, 1896 – January 5, 1942) was an Italian American photographer, model, actor, and revolutionary political activist for the Comintern. She left her native Italy in 1913 and emigrated to the United States, where she settled in San Francisco with her father and sister. In San Francisco, Modotti worked as a seamstress, model, and theater performer and, later, moved to Los Angeles where she worked in film. She later became a photographer and essayist. In 1922 she moved to Mexico, where she became an active member of the Mexican Communist Party.
More information can be found here.
Márta Mészáros Retrospective
Nine Months a film by Márta Mészáros
Julie works in a brickworks. In order to bring up her child alone, she has interrupted her studies but continues to prepare for an exam in the evenings. She is having an affair with her foreman, János. When she becomes pregnant, János agrees to marry her, but imposes his authoritarian ways on her. No matter what the cost, she leaves him and prefers to give birth alone.
More information can be found here.
Valérie Jouve: Le monde est un abri
By combining previously unseen work - notably the film Porte d'Aubervilliers (2020) - with older images, this solo exhibition attempts to embody the idea that one of the primary necessities of every living species is shelter. The notions of building and construction, but also of natural refuge, lead us to rethink these contemporary gestures, which today are closer to the financial economy than to the protection of living things. Valérie Jouve's photographic work focuses on the relationship between the human being and the landscape, and more specifically the city and its surroundings. Each image is built around the notion of an encounter between bodies (people, architecture, and the organic, mineral and atmospheric elements of the landscape). Her 'characters' (human or non-human), without caricature or anecdote, mark an intense relationship with their environment, whether within the image itself or in the montages that the artist uses in her exhibitions.
Valérie Jouve was born in Saint-Etienne in 1964. Trained as an ethnologist at the University of Lyon and then as a photographer at the ENSP in Arles, "her work has always questioned the dominant frameworks in a dialogue with individuals and unusual places", she writes. She has tirelessly observed her era and sought to find the right perception, the right perspective. A singular figure among the artists of her generation, her work has been exhibited since 1996 in France and abroad, in prestigious institutions as well as alternative venues. Her exhibitions are often conceived as visual compositions of images produced independently, at different periods, and whose montage makes sense.
More information can be found here.
Conversation with Alessandra Sanguinetti, Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz
Conversation with Alessandra Sanguinetti, Guillermina Aranciaga and Belinda Stutz around the books The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams and The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer (MACK Books).
The event will be held in Spanish and translated into French.
More information can be found here.
Valentine Prissette: Sleeping paintings
Valentine Prissette works with cloth. She cares for this intimate, everyday object that accompanies us throughout our lives, from one generation to the next, from one house to the next, from dusk to dawn. She collects them, transforms them and reveals the importance of the traces they leave on our subconscious.
In the first room of POUSH's Rift, Valentine Prissette stages her fabrics and 'puts her beds to bed' by blurring the interplay of scale in her scenographies. She reconstitutes a room within a room, a bedroom within a bedroom, inviting us on a journey towards our own intimacy.
More information can be found here.
Book launch “Serre” by Isadora Soares Belletti
These gardens’ emergence paralleled and facilitated European colonial expansion, reflecting the desire to dominate not only the so-called new world but also other forms of life, such as plants. In March 2023, artists Isadora Soares-Belletti and Sofia Salazar Rozales went together to the Jardin des Plantes of Paris to photograph its Grandes Serres and create a counter-route: one that looks for the breeches and signs of the past. Both of them had an identical disposable camera. After developing both films, the images were mixed and detached from their respective authors. If, at first, the artists knew exactly which photograph belonged to each eye, with time, memories became blurred, and the frontiers loosened.
Persona Curada is a non-profit experimental curatorial project founded in 2017 by Noelia Portela, for the purpose of fostering Latin American Contemporary art practices. Persona Curada aims to provide a platform for artists and writers, offering new and nomadic modes of exhibition-making and art dissemination through our core exhibition and public event programs. They are committed to nurturing our emerging artists through research and collaboration opportunities, while fostering cultural and social links between Latin America, and France. Their publications and related projects support the work of our artists across narratives, and their plurality of research.
More information can be found here.
Anne Deguelle: L'Arctique fantôme
Since it was abandoned in 1998, nothing seems to have been touched in the autonomous Soviet city built around a mining concession in Norwegian territory. Anne Deguelle collects snippets of existence from this enclosed space: photos stuck to the wall, dirty mugs, leaflets from a cultural programme, petrified house plants. A snapshot of a change of scene. But this is no reportage. The framing is curiously off-centre, the volumes are transformed into flat areas, the light is spread out and powdery, blurred. The artist works with the archive, the diary, exposing a back-and-forth between the intimate and the universal. Anne Deguelle likes to question history, how it is made and, by the same token, how we construct ourselves. By lingering on details, the artist shifts our gaze and follows their evolution over the years.
More information here.
Myriam Pruvot: Chant éloigné
To mark its 20th anniversary, La Maréchalerie has invited Anne-Laure Chamboissier to design an exhibition in a dialogue between the identity of the venue and the specificity of her personal research.
Anne-Laure Chamboissier, an art historian and curator, is exploring the question of sound and music in its cross-disciplinary relationship with the visual arts, architecture and literature. Sensitive to the way in which an artist's proposal fits into a given context, her choice fell on the artist Myriam Pruvot.
An evening readings with poets Maud Joiret and Elke de Rijcke
An evening of meetings and readings with poets Maud Joiret and Elke de Rijcke.
To celebrate the publication of Marées vaches by Maud Joiret, published by Castor Astral and
Et puis, soudain, il carillonne by Elke de Rijcke, published by Lanskine.
More information can be found here.
Hélène Delprat : Monster Soup
Inspired by literature (Ovid's Metamorphoses), film and radio, Hélène Delprat's daily practice, using drawing, painting, photography, archives and video, has resulted in a body of work full of self-mockery, a kind of book of hours that is both dark and sensitive, where fiction and documentary rub shoulders. She loves the idea of a death that is funny, monstrous, outrageous, melancholy... Her real or fictional interviews, her radio drawings and her collection of articles complete this kind of inventory of a world that is both fortuitous and deliberate. Her work also explores issues of recording, memory, identity and travel.
More information can be found here.
Nathalie Du Pasquier: Année révolutionnaire
Nathalie Du Pasquier (born 1957) is an artist and designer mostly known for her work as a founding member of the Memphis Group. Her early body of work includes furniture, textiles, clothing designs and jewelry in addition to iconic work in decoration and patterns. Since 1987, she has consistently dedicated herself to painting.
Du Pasquier was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1957. Du Pasquier drew influence from her parents. Her mother was an art historian, which gave Du Pasquier an appreciation for classic art. From 1975 to 1977, she traveled through Gabon and West Africa, and in 1979 she moved to Milan. Du Pasquier drew influence from African art and music.
More information can be found here.
Nina Azoulay: Comme un rond dans un carré
Nina Azoulay graduated from the Art-Space section of Ensad in 2023, and works in installation, sculpture and drawing, as well as in a fragmentary style of writing she describes as “stacked poetry”. She uses fabrics of various shapes and colors taken from plaster blocks, colored round-headed pins, portmanteaus, ropes, curtain tiebacks, reflective sequins and found images. This attraction to textiles has led to research into the skin, raising questions about permeability, vulnerability, limits, vertigo, inheritance and possible transformations.
In a recent series of sculptures entitled Papillons de nuit, 2023, the reuse of second-hand clothing and the superimposition of fabrics purchased and/or made by the artist are combined with plexiglass, wood, metal and rope to create veritable silhouettes with singular identities. These sculptures, which bear the names of women (Rosalind, Olivia, Salomé), are posited from the outset as possible ghostly portraits, implicitly raising the fictional identity contained in each of them. Nina Azoulay’s attention to detail – the folds, certain rolls of fabric, their tension or floatiness – makes all the chosen ornaments attractive and graceful, but just as structural. Is identity wrapped up in the folds of trimmings?
Viviane Sassen — PHOSPHOR: Art & Fashion 1990-2023
The MEP – Maison Européenne de la Photographie – presents the first retrospective in France by Dutch artist Viviane Sassen. This exhibition, which comprises more than 200 works, reveals over thirty years of multifaceted creation bringing together photography, collage, painting and video.
Taking up the two main floors of the MEP, the exhibition gathers together emblematic series, including “Umbra”, “Parasomnia”, “Flamboya” and “Roxane”, as well as unseen archives, mixed-media works incorporating photography, painting, collage and video, and fashion photography. This exhibition will shed light on Viviane Sassen’s creative process by focusing on two main themes: the incessant search for new photographic forms and the importance of intimacy in her work. For Sassen, photography is more than a mere surface: it is an opening onto a place where her dreams, desires and fears co-exist with the world in all its tangible reality.
Initially studying fashion design, Viviane Sassen quickly turned to photography, pursuing her education at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). After completing her studies, she alternated between personal projects and commercial work. Her photographic style – with its saturated colours, interplay of light and shadow and unique portrayals of the human body – was soon in great demand. Viviane Sassen rapidly gained worldwide recognition, both in the fashion industry and in the cultural world.
On the occasion of this exhibition, a 400-page, fully illustrated book comprising several essays and designed by Dutch graphic artist Irma Boom, will bepublished by Prestel in collaboration with the MEP.
Viviane Sassen was born in 1972 in Amsterdam, and lives there. She studied fashion design, followed by photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU), and Ateliers Arnhem.
More information on the event can be found here.
To access events prior to April 2023, click here.