“I am like one who wore his brick to show the world how was his home.”
Bertolt Brecht
Often I was asked this question: how do I see myself as an artist? My answer has always been the same: I consider myself an immigrant worker. My job is to consider what it is to be an artist, when he feels different from in his own cultural context, even in his own role.
With this necessity, this permanent need to think of exile, the project of the Exile Pavilion was born, as a traveling project, offering a parallel cartography, a free geography of temporary exhibitions, with stops in different countries.
The project raises the question of the exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. He wants to question both the global and specific links between various forms of displacement, whether the migrant worker’s situation, the expatriate, the refugee or the exile of war, natural disasters, economical problems, and political or racial persecutions.The Exile Pavilion wants to invest and cross all boundaries, revisiting the experiences of the exile and reactivate the traces in history. Where does the exile begin and where does it end?
Are we all equal against the displacement and exile? And from who are we exiles?The Exile Pavilion does not exist as an architectural building even if the proposal is made for architects to imagine. But it is the works of artists, visual artists, musicians, poets, writers, performers they are exiles or their work deals with the displacement, which build together this protean and nomadic pavilion. Its journey will make layovers at artistic structures, institutions, ephemeral places, in the form of exhibitions, publications and meetings. At each stop, the works and archival materials are redesigned according to the place and its history.
mounir fatmi,
June 30, 2016
Studio Fatmi Paris
Phone and Fax: +33 (0)9 52 78 14 92
mounir fatmi
fatmi.mounir@studiofatmi.com
Project Assistant
Laura Pandolfo laura@studiofatmi.com
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Untitled Agency
From the series “The heart does what it wants”. Courtesy: the artist
A painting made in 2015, terribly topical today: a group of people piled up in an inflatable raft. Above, a crowd advances, indifferent to the boat. I notice that the sea is black and that the artist’s distinctive colors can be seen, in the form of several circles. This is the last work of art painted by Fromanger. Sentimental crowds, street scenes, portraits of philosophical comrades such as Barthes, Deleuze or Foucault: Fromanger injects color into a relation to the world in which he includes himself, through which he fights, paint brushes in hand (or using electrical tape) employing press photographs that he projects onto his paintings containing figures linked together by a serpentine line or tattooed with dashes of primary colors, slightly cold, purple or watery green.
Born in 1939 in Pontchartrain, Gérard Fromanger lives and works in Paris. One of the pioneers of the return to figuration in the late 1950s and early 1960s in France, Gérard Fromanger became a leading figure of figuration narrative. Friend of sculptor César, with whom he shared a studio, and of Alberto Giacometti, Fromanger joined the figuration narrative artists at the Salon de mai in 1964 and 1965 and soon be- came involved in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Depicting urban environments and anonymous passers-by, his painting technique was close to photography. As a founding member of the Atelier Populaire at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he also produced various collective and political serigraphy works during the May 1968 events.
From the series “The heart does what it wants”. Courtesy: the artist