Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon have investigated and condensed the schizophrenia of international airports in performances, research and more recently in a book
Category Archive: art in Paris
The state of suspension is often likened to being paralysed or stunned, but it is actually a constant, relentless, never-ending struggle to adapt
In 1982, the French public telecommunications company launched a revolutionary system combining the telephone and information technology. It was a beige, plastic box and it was called the Minitel. In 2013, members of the Graffiti Research Lab France decided to explore the sonic and visual possibilities of the defunct technology
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Linked from one another by a uniform protocol, from Marseille to Yellowknife, airports might be today the suburbs of an “invisible world capital”, foreseen by the SF writer J.G. Ballard, the tarmac of a global village, the doorstep of an artificial and virtualized world
An exhibition in Paris explores how women have been judged according to different sets of values -and often with less impartiality- than men. From the XIVth Century to the end of the Second World War, French women were judged for their crimes (or what was perceived as such) but also simply for being women. Something in their pertaining to their gender made them more likely to commit certain crimes…
In a world where scientific rationalism rules, interest is on the rise for alternative forms of relating to the world and to others.
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The exhibition explores the mechanisms by which cultures, from the most ancestral to the most contemporary, “inject personality” into objects. Through 230 pieces: statues, installations, paintings, robots, excerpts from films, the show throws light on these “strange humans”
The work takes the shape of a matrix of 99 balloons that inflate individually to surround visitors in a physical, sonic, and visual experience. The piece inhales and exhales, expands and deflates, building up an almost claustrophobic experience that aims to echo the crises and dilemmas our society is going through
Members of RYBN were participating to refrag, a series of workshops, talks and performances that explored Glitch Art. Their presentation looked at what happens when HFT algorithms slip, glitch and disrupt the trading system. They analyzed four famous ‘flash crashes.’ Their study was based on a rigorous analysis of documents available online
An invitation to artists, researchers, activists and critical engineers to submit ideas, thoughts, and designs for the future of 3D printing. The submissions should reflect on the current state of additive manufacturing, find the potential encoded into the most challenging 3D printed objects and push 3D printing to its most speculative and radical limits. Once collected, these submissions will form The 3D Additivist Cokbook
I was expecting the usual about tattoos: the criminals, the freak shows, the Māori warriors, the virtuosity of contemporary tattoo artists. I certainly found all of that in the show. I wasn’t however expecting to be shocked by the way tattoos were used to mark women
Seizing on strong iconographic symbols taken from the Nazi aesthetics and the worlds of childhood and cartoons, Zonder revisits these forms of narration and the innocence they carry (children drawings, clear lines) as well as the cruelty (realism, caricature) through mise-en-scenes with a gory tone where sex and barbarity are more than compatible
A few days ago, i was at La Cantine in Paris to cover and be a member of the jury of the second edition of the ArtGame Weekend. Artists, graphic designers, musicians, interaction designers, engineers, VJ’s and coders were given 48 hours to develop a game for mobile devices
The expedition as an artistic endeavour…
A growing number of artists are choosing this framework: relocating creation in order to define it differently, setting out, installing the work of art or producing it outside of its conventional environment
I had never heard of Laurent Montaron before last week. I was preparing a trip to Paris and going through the list of exhibitions open when i stumbled upon a small photo of a Catholic saint and, more interestingly, a press release that mentioned the artist’s interest in the history of media from the appearance of mechanical modes of representation in the late 19th century up to today’s different digital forms
Over the weekend i saw Martin Parr meeting followers of Islam in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood in Paris, Stéphane Duroy’s documentation of the cityscape and society of England at the time of Thatcherism and Justine Kurland taking the road with train-hoppers, hitchhikers, wilderness squatters, wayfarers, and drifters in the USA
Quick post! Miss Van and her impenetrable dolls get a darker edge at the Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris
Wolf spent hours scanning Paris on Google Street View, identifying surprising moments, mundane gestures, behaviour and anonymous people as they unsuspectingly go about their daily life. It looks as if Wolf is stealing moments of privacy when all he did was just spot and select scenes mechanically taken by Google’s vehicle
Thanks to the symbolic and allegorical power of photography, combined with its documentary potential, we find ourselves faced with an extreme dimension of life that oscillates between the sublime and the horrific. As an activity accessible to all, photography helps us to understand that the toughest ordeals of pain and violence can paradoxically lead us to an existential experience whose outcome is a perception of the sublime
A few months ago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris decided to ban photographs of the artworks and of the inside of the building, allegedly ‘to preserve the comfort of visitors and the safety of the artworks.’ OrsayCommons is a performance pro-photo, pro-remix and pro-public domain at the Musée d’Orsay that civilly and cheekily protests against what its participants call “a measure not only at odds with our times but also illegitimate since it concerns public heritage.”
There is a stunning photo exhibition right now at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. Stunning and disturbing. I had to take a small pause from it after having seen only half of it. Yet, you won’t find any mention of the show on the museum’s website. Nor will you see billboards outside the museum to announce/denounce its existence
If you’re in Paris too, you might like to swing by rue de Turenne and see a couple of exhibitions at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin. I promise you an impressive circle made of fake bear rugs, lamps made of mini designer chairs and gigantic pink, grey and black toys
Poltergeists are on the agenda at PERGOLA. Against the background of a haunted modernity, silhouettes of erased lives demand restitution: Swiss tavern lanterns cast a gloom over the museum space, the ventilation shafts bring back good memories of monumental architecture, the melancholy of the Renaissance seeps into this no man’s land, pneumatic dispatch breaches communication….
I’ll never recommend enough a visit to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. No matter what they are showing i will go and discover something exciting. Such as the statue of a Man-Shark or the Kachina/katsina dolls which are part of The Making of Images, an anthropology exhibition that deciphers large artistic and material productions of humanity to reveal what is not seen directly in an image
An office is frozen in an arctic winter, plants propagate behind walls, the same person is repeatedly struck by lightning, money goes up in smoke, and a high frequency soundtrack plays only for the dogs…. CHASING NAPOLEON recognizes how a rise and fall can spread to reality itself. A wavering of interpretations, an inversion of values, and a paradox of situations… Here everything happens as if the world has slipped into a parallel universe
A White Elephant is shedding its skin only to reveal an even older, uneven skin underneath
Most of the works exhibited at the Jeu de Paume date from the 70s and 80s, an era dominated in England by the rule of Margaret Thatcher. Parr doesn’t have fond memories of her reign and the photos he collects attest of the social decline and distress the working class went through at the time
Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr reveals this artist’s hidden side as a collector of books, photographs, postcards, objects and photographs by British and international artists, alongside the photographs from his “Luxury” series
The 2009 edition of the @rt Outsiders Festival presents works that explore the meaning of living in extreme environments, in the imaginary realm as well as in the physical one, in the political, social and environmental fields as well as in the poetic ones
I met dear dear Betty at the Parrworld exhibition, she was dancing the night away
Going beyond the phenomenon of number stations, the exhibition explores forms of art that elude any wistful desire for fixed interpretations, they include mathematical encoding, the production of aurora borealis, archiving contact lenses, seismic sensors, the disappearance of hanged men and mountain summits
Ever since its opening in 2007, the museum had to face accusations of reinforcing colonial stereotypes. An exhibition about the famous Ape-Man, created by an author who had never set foot in Africa, was unlikely to tame detractors. But the curators are smart. Their perspective is to help visitors understand how Westerners’ misconceptions of Africa, its noble savages, untamed jungles and scantily clad women, came about. All i cared about was a couple of statues representing Leopard Men
At no cost at all, the young artists have at their disposal a huge array of material that they can grab, move, superimpose, and organize onto temporary installations and sculptures
The exhibition is set under the aegis of Nikola Tesla and its name refers to a village in Alaska. Little more than 200 inhabitants live in Gakona. There’s a service station, a small school, a post office, a couple of diners and a scientific research base: the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program
Jordi Colomer studies the way in which the modern city influences human behaviour and explores the ubiquity and drawbacks of modernism in the urban environment
An exhibition in Paris brings together works by teachers and students of the celebrated Dusseldorf School: Bernd and Hiller Becher, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and many others
With his Lolita figures borrowed from manga imagery, Mr. has made a name for himself in the space separating irony from candor. In this ambiguous representation of pubescent amazement, he has combined the feigned innocence of Nabokov’s heroine with another era and another cultural register. What comes to mind are his works that seem inspired from the figure of the young Heidi in her underwear in the Alpine meadows
This is the fourth section of a work of seven dedicated to the Chernobyl tragedy and it focuses on Slavutych, a model city purposefully built to host the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and their families, evacuated from the abandoned city of Pripyat
Adrian Street was a glam rock wrestler who gained fame for dressing in flamboyant platform shoes and glitter capes, wearing extravagant make up, kissing his opponents on stage and tarting them up with make up when he had them pinned down
In big cities, groups of people decide to occupy then inhabit buildings which were left unfinished and abandoned because of economic crisis, ups and downs of the estate market, war, cataclysm, etc, giving way to an unexpected collaboration between construction industry and invention prompted by necessity