Pierre Clément is presenting his Transcom Primitive solo exhibition at Paris’ XPO Gallery, opening October 22 and running to December 12.
Curated by Marianne Derrien, the show is a first at XPO by Paris-based Clément, whose work interweaves the aesthetic, cultural and political forms and considerations emerging with the internet.
The exhibition will show the (tele-)communication between assemblages of manufactured objects and raw materials, questioning “the sculptural potential of the image” and the room for non-human error within sculpture, design and technology. “Thereby”, as Derrien states in the press release,“giving each of these forms an alternate history filled with fictions and new symbols”.
The exhibition, curated by Alexis Jakubowicz and Philippe Riss, is caught in the fiction of a long-sacrificed miracle, somewhere between “torpor and life”, inspired by a poem by Charles Baudelaire, a famous painting by Watteau, and “the eternal residence of love”.
These events are mainly experienced through real-time online documentation, expanding on the idea that the record of a work has shifted from being less a representational tool and more the primary experience. A specifically designed web application that aggregates and collects data with the #6pmeu hashtag presents a democratised presentation of work on the 6pm Your Local Time ‘Socialwall’ page. It’s based on an equalized relationship between artist and viewer that can be read as a more formalized discourse on artselfie viewer-based documentation.
Pierre Clément + Annabelle Arlie, Temporary Arrangement, ‘Candle’, ‘Still Life’, ‘Island’ (2015) Image courtesy the artists.
Set in their basement, Enrico Boccioletti and Elena Radice present Studio Visit, a “multi-personal exhibition”. Occluding specificity, the description for the Facebook event is a chat extract from the online chat website Omegle. Strangers are asked to disclose the contents of their basement. A discussion about Dr. Dre, dead bodies, Twitter following and ex-girlfriends ensues. The rough surfaces of the basement make for an uncanny atmosphere. Dimly-lit in green and blue fluorescent lights, the basement reveals objects and compositions that resurface like deep secrets only to be concealed again once the viewers have left.
Pierre Clément and Annabelle Arlie’s Temporary Arrangement at Glassbox in Paris functions as a cross between a studio visit and an exhibition, where the works retain a transient relationship to the space. The six pieces on show cohesively present a symbolic juxtaposition, in particular Arlie’s totem-like ‘Candle’ (2015) and Clément’s ‘Still Life’ (2015) and ‘Island’ (2015). Substituting a sedimented signification with assemblages that act as empty shells, the fabricated artefacts and compositions are mostly made-up synthetic and quotidian elements. Suggesting function, yet remaining by and large purposeless, these artefacts open up a discourse on form and functionality.
Mara Cassiani, #Ed3n and the Perfect Life (2015). Detail. Image courtesy the artist.
At Centrale Fies, in Italy’s city of Dro Mara Cassiani presents performance and installation #Ed3n and the Perfect Life. Set up as a luxurious spa, the space is dotted with customized towels embroidered with mantras and affirmations like “Your body your temple” and “Hydrate yourself”. On the one hand, #ED3N… regards the luxurious spa experience as replacing the need for religious and cult-like introspection. It is the new Garden of Eden. The Biblical reference is reconceptualised as a stable ecosystem; a multi-sensorial ritual akin to esoteric prayer practice. On the other hand, …#The Perfect Life refers to market ventures exploiting human desire.
In a private bathroom in Paris, Dustin Cauchi’s 055XB HEXAL plays with material duality and new-found functionality. ‘MTPIXI’, a sculptural work composed of two Manfrotto tripods, is perched over a water-filled basin. As sculpture and reflection become intertwined, it is increasingly difficult to view it as separate from the surrounding space. Common bathroom objects appear in parallel to intrusive structures. One such example is a chrome bin that is fronted by a brushed steel sheet. Hidden away behind a semi-transparent shower door is another lit, tripod sculpture which is connected to the shower plumbing. It is made indiscernible by a constant flow of smoke emanating from behind the door.
The viewers’ interaction with the artworks is observed as tagged photos and videos published in real-time on the 6PM website. This is aggregated data constructing a homogenic platform that sheds light on how online documentation has shifted our understanding of materiality and what a work means today.**
Dustin Cauchi, ‘MTPIXI HEXAL’ (2015) from the HEXAL Series. Image courtesy the artist.
La Cité internationale des Artsopens a new group exhibition titled Wir Kinder Aus Asbest, launching at their Paris location on July 10.
The title, which translates to We are children of asbestos—asbestos being the highly heat-resistant fibrous mineral often woven into fabrics to insulate and make them fire-resistant—alludes to the exhibition’s thematics, which confront asbestos as a “symbol for a total melt-down of a modern technology”.
Turf Projects opens up a massive exhibition exploring how artists network and market themselves with Business As Usual, running at the South London space from July 9 to July 30.
Looking at self-marketing, often thought to be a dirty practice in the art world and one at odds with the romantic vision of the “authentic” impoverished artist, Business As Usual invites one hundred of them to explore this “almost performatory element of their practices” in the second of a series of exhibitions traveling throughout the UK.
we wanted to be better and ended up being happy, the name of a Fenêtre project-curated show that opened at Galerie Joseph Tang on March 27 (exhibition photos, top right), is now making its online migration in collaboration with OFluxo Blog. It is also a paradoxical statement that could drive you into an existential scream if you let it. Aren’t better people happier? Or is that ignorant people? Are they happier because they forgot it all? Are we sadder because we keep remembering?
The title, their press release writes, is an offhand statement in reply to the “promise of futurity in mainstream sci-fi culture in the 1980s and 1990s”. The future, they say, is a thing of the past; in contemporary culture, “presence has substituted promise, favouring a view of the future as an abridged temporal phenomenon”. We no longer have even nostalgia to cling to.
The group show, which features Felicia Atkinson, Dustin Cauchi, Pierre Clément, and Tilman Hornig,ran at Galerie Joseph Tang for one weekend in late March as part of the ongoing Fenêtre Project in collaboration with the Paris gallery, and is launching at its digital home for an online exhibition. The “curatorial / editorial / convening / creative practice”, developed by Mangion and Cauchi, deals with the dialectics of online/offline and the ways in which the two are converging in the contemporary art field.
Examining curation as an active, dynamic practice, they set up a landscape or “micro ecosystem” of signs and signals composed in hand-engraved text on various objects, like routers, silent speakers, laser pointers, and organic matter. “In this landscape,” they write, “the works co-habit the space harmoniously. This landscape however, harbours a system of signification that is not always visible, at times manifesting a disruption that destabilises this found harmony.” **
