Performance-exhibition
in Do Disturb Festival
Curated with Diamètre
Léa Belooussovitch, Esther Coquet, Fleuryfontaine, Guibert+Cazin, Garush Melkonyan, Dimitri Robert-Rimsky, Lucy Watts
Palais de Tokyo
Paris, France
2019
Manifestation, a performed exhibition during Do Disturb Festival where reproduction of artworks are brandished by a group of carriers.
This action brings into dialogue artistic approaches that evoke the density of the flow of information we face, the omnipresence of messages and images and our trouble in assimilating them. The staging of a demonstration arouses our interest in the fact that this type of gathering represents a collective experience of struggle, reflection and hope. However this selection of works reproduced in the same format also faces a paradox: the event itself is the object of translation and even media manipulation.
In a web where images are perpetually transmitted to us, Léa Belooussovitch masks the subjects in order to better reveal them. Here is presented a reproduction of her original installation Missed Shot: the capture of a video showing a hunter shooting a bird as it flies is printed on fabric and hung by an arrow. No trace of the hunt can be seen on the image. And with the wind, the bird is falsely released.
Dimitri Robert-Rimsky also works with videos found on the internet. He seizes the hazy scenery it contains to question our relationship with the landscape - both physical and mental, as discussed in Robert Smithson's A SEDIMENTATION OF THE MIND: EARTH PROJECTS. In the same way as geology, memory proceeds by sedimentation and retrieval. It archives some images, it loses others. The process is reminiscent of the Internet, another form of collective memory, since everyone is invited to increase this constantly fluctuating magma. Through the re-appropriation of images of mountainous and desert landscapes with no spatial or geographical indication, the artist sculpts a territory where myths and outdated representations intertwine with a future where geology comes to conquer a new social space.
The literary and semantic whirlwind of Esther Coquet incites us to "become a mountain". What appears to be the encounter between a calligram and an exquisite corpse constantly gives us to review the order and meaning of words in order to reinvent new collective images and "become a burning fire". This invitation to a game aimed at deconstructing slogans and systems echoes La Grande Marche by the graphic designers Guibert+Cazin. On the same level, different claims get lost in the image to gather around the same injunction replaying the effect of saturation of messages whose meaning and scope we can no longer grasp.
There is also a game of letters and speeches with Lucy Watts, of whom we present two reproductions of her Alphabet of Propaganda in Peacetime. First, the letter K stands for the investigative journalist Naomi Klein, author of the now famous No Logo (2001), in which she invited us to fight against the abuses of certain multinationals and their omnipresence in the public space. Then, the letter M does not stand not Manifestation but for Mensonge (Lie). There is a lot of humour in its squeaky line (not surprising for the woman who also created the "SFPHBIA", Society For Putting Back Humour Into Art), a comic echoing Garush Melkonyan's Political Analogies, absurd comparisons between political gestures and animal forms. The Fleuryfontaine duo, finally, presents another form of collage with Les Blonds, belonging to the Shredder series, official portraits of statesmen and stateswomen that an algorithmic program has cut into thin strips and randomly recomposed, recalling the work of the shredder destroying obsolete or compromising documents.