From exile I made glasses to see —

Work

Year

2005

Dan Perjovschi’s drawing is simple as a child’s. But his message is still as incisive, his favourite targets being the world’s great questions, glob- al warming, the enlargement of the European Union toward poor Romania, Islam, the rich and the poor…

The simplicity of the drawing contrasts with the work’s evoc- ative powerfulness, directly inspired by cultural and politi- cal current affairs. Three lines, two words, and everything has been said.

Through the circulation of signs, Dan Perjovschi takes us to a world traversed with humour but also darkness, of- tentimes tender, sometimes insolent. With a concise a quick gesture, he elaborates a sim- ple political strategy that nev- er forgets to be poetic.

In an interview with Charline Corubolo for the “Petit Bul- letin” newspaper, Dan Per- jovschi said: “We are all living in a post-Charlie Hebdo world. Freedom of speech is funda- mental in our contemporary society and in contemporary art, but I believe this freedom has to go hand in hand with re- sponsibility. We are now under pressure to claim our rights, to be better protected and speak freely… It’s a very important time. I reflect upon these is- sues in my drawings. We must reply to violence with intelli- gence and humour. We must laugh about death.”

Dan Perjovschi

Born in 1961 in Sibiu. He lives and works in Bucharest.

Internationally acclaimed artist and political activist Dan Perjovschi covers surfaces worldwide—walls, windows, ceilings, doors, floors— with his trenchant, terse cartoons, criticizing current geo-political, social, and cultural crises and customs almost as fast as they form. He began developing his practice on the walls of his own apartment in the early 1980s, when the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu forced him to keep his subversive wit under cover. With the 1989 Romanian revolution, in which he participated, he was unleashed. For Perjovschi, everything is fair game, from the Occupy Wall Street Movement to the hierarchies of the art world to the apparent decline in the quality of Finnish men’s sperm. In his words: “Europe is one of my subjects. Everything else is the other. I look, understand, and visually translate local and global issues. […] I am more time-specific than site-specific.”

Courtesy: The artist

Work

Year

2015

Lampedusa Checkpoint unfolds like a tragedy, with its dramaturgy and its sense of inevitability. The video opens with an image that has become symbolic, that of The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, and seems to link the Mediterranean tragedy with the Senegal River, which can be seen through the portholes on the mezzanine.

Then the artist appears, like a shipwreck victim, desperately trying to dry his soaking wet clothes. The water drips, trickles; the split screen increases the impression of a shipwreck despite its sculptural scarcity. The voice of Asmahan, a famous Syrian female singer from the early 20th century, emerges, probably a popular tune... The entire life of this woman, who was born on a refugee boat and died drowning in the Nile, echoes exile and nostalgia.

When Ali Assaf created this performance in 2004, Lampedusa, an island off the southern coast of Sicily, a gateway to Eu- rope for many refugees, wasn’t yet the tragic checkpoint it has become since, leaving over 2000 victims every year at the bottom of the sea surrounding it.

Ali Assaf

Born in 1950 in Al Basrah, Iraq. He lives and works in Rome.

Studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Baghdad and in Rome, where he graduated in 1977. He has been living in Rome since then. Since 1970 his work was shown in many solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Among others: XIII Biennale d’Arte Sacra Contemporanea, Museo Staurós, Isola del Gran Sasso; 11th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egitto; Gulf Film Festival, Dubai 2009; Roma, The Road to Contemporary Art, MACRO Testaccio, Rome 2011; his work is currently in the Iraq Pavilion in the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011.

Note #1

From exile I made glasses to see
—

mounir fatmi interviewed by Marie Moignard, September 21st, 2017.

Marie Moignard: In 2013 in Casablanca, “The Straight Line” was a strongly autobiographical exhibit. Today, the pieces you pres- ent tend to focus on displacement. Do you feel like an “exiled” artist?

mounir fatmi: “The Straight Line” in 2013 wasn’t just an autobi- ographical exhibit: it had several levels of meaning up for interpre- tation. First and foremost, I tried to show that the individual is linked to the world, that my own little history is linked to the great history of the world. There was also another level of meaning, which had to do with the question of the nature of man confronted with the nature that surrounds us. Of course, all this gravitates around the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In fact, his work is present again in the Exile Pavilion project. But going back to your question, yes, I am an exiled artist. I live in permanent exile. I think that the notion of exile is a situation that has permeated throughout the entire history of humanity. It isn’t contemporary. Exile has always been perceived as a problem, because it usually happens at a critical moment in time, war, crisis, when people are faced with the grav- est difficulties and catastrophes, whether natural or human. Despite borders and flags, we are all potentially in migration, even if only because of the uncertainty of the situation of the world. Ultimately, I think that leaving your country for another is a rather traumatizing situation. From this necessity to flee, exile can be perceived as a therapy, a work on oneself.

MM: Tangiers is your hometown, a city that has become the Mo- roccan metropolis showcasing the country’s development, but also a gateway to Europe for migrants from Africa. Is it symbolic to show your work in this city, ten years after your last exhibit there?

mf: Tangiers is a city of exiles of all sorts. Those that come to seek a bygone era, with a certain nostalgia that tourist guides sell them. Others come to brave the sea, to cross over to the other side. There are also domestic exiles, those that live there and have never left. My father for example never traveled to another country. He spent his entire life in Morocco, particularly in Tangiers. He often told me that Tangiers was the most beautiful city in the world, without ever having visited any other city to be able to compare, of course. And then there are the mad ones. There are a lot of crazy people in this city. I don’t know why, but I am fascinated with mad people. The question of madness as an internal exile is something I would like to develop in a future stopover of the Exile Pavilion.

MM: The “Exile Pavilion” has already made stops at the National Archives in Paris, at the Venice Biennale... What will be the next destination of this traveling project?

mf: The Exile Pavilion is a project of traveling exhibits with artists and curators invited to organize stopovers in different countries. The first stop was at the National Archives Museum in Paris, the second one was in Marseilles. We are currently working on several other stops in Rabat, Algiers, Dakar, Barcelona, Mexico City, Bamako... It’s an endless journey. At the Venice Biennale, it was an invitation from the curator of the Tunisian pavilion, Lina Lazare, to present my “Exile Pavilion” project as a concept within another pavilion. Sometimes I get invited to participate in an exhibit to present only the Exile Pa- vilion and talk about the project. In those cases, it doesn’t constitute a stopover per se. I’m not always able to impose a stopover with several artists, because that requires a significant budget and a lots of investment. That’s what happened at the Delacroix Gallery of the French Institute in Tangiers.

Work

Year

2004

aliassaf.com

Lampedusa Checkpoint unfolds like a tragedy, with its dramaturgy and its sense of inevitability. The video opens with an image that has become symbolic, that of The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault, and seems to link the Mediterranean tragedy with the Senegal River, which can be seen through the portholes on the mezzanine.
Then the artist appears, like a shipwreck victim, desperately trying to dry his soaking wet clothes. The water drips, trick- les; the split screen increases the impression of a shipwreck despite its sculptural scarcity. The voice of Asmahan, a famous Syrian female singer from the early 20th century, emerges, probably a popular tune... The entire life of this woman, who was born on a refugee boat and died drowning in the Nile, echoes exile and nostalgia.
When Ali Assaf created this performance in 2004, Lampedusa, an island off the southern coast of Sicily, a gateway to Eu- rope for many refugees, wasn’t yet the tragic checkpoint it has become since, leaving over 2000 victims every year at the bottom of the sea surrounding it.

Ali Assaf

Born in 1950 in Al Basrah, Iraq. He lives and works in Rome.
Studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Baghdad and in Rome, where he graduated in 1977. He has been living in Rome since then. Since 1970 his work was shown in many solo and group exhibitions in Italy, Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Among others: XIII Biennale d’Arte Sacra Contemporanea, Museo Staurós, Isola del Gran Sasso; 11th International Cairo Biennale, Cairo, Egitto; Gulf Film Fes- tival, Dubai 2009; Roma, The Road to Contemporary Art, MACRO Testaccio, Rome 2011; his work is currently in the Iraq Pavilion in the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011.

Courtesy: The artist

Benjamin Bertrand

Work

Rafales

Performance, 30 min

Year

2015

The storm and the gust of wind translate a state of instability of air, a fluid that is common to the interior and the exterior.
Rafales (“Gusts”) conducts a work of research on its origin and its undulating movement. Rafales sets the scene for a ro- mantic encounter between the dynamic fluid that is wind, a physical landscape and a cou- ple. Rafales explores the space in the middle, which extends between the first breath that unites and the last breath that separates. This archeological scene could be set inside the maternal womb and on the sand of an ancient arena. The duet, a hermaphroditic creature and a polymorphous couple, sets out on a quest for a common pulsation, its main tools being a belly dance and scansion of breathing. From there, a dialectical landscape emerges between the risk of falling and the fact of being maintained by the other, be- tween breathing and apnea, weightlessness and gravity.
Borrowing from ritual form, Rafales explores and exposes states of presence to oneself and to the Other, through the tensing of muscle, the vibration of sound and the rubbing of skin. How does the sensitive experience make the boundaries of this elusive Me-skin porous? How can the organic, perceptive, empathic limits of two interacting bodies be ex- tended? How can the space of the stage reach beyond tensions related to identity to create a shared sensitive territory?

Benjamin Bertrand

Born in 1989 in Paris, France. He lives and works in Paris.

Trained in literature and philosophy in khâgne and at the Sorbonne as well as in contemporary dance (Conservatoire des abbesses-Paris), Benjamin Bertrand pursues a career as a dancer and contemporary choreographer. He has performed among others for the choreographer Olivier Dubois in Tragédie et Auguri, the visual artist Jean-Luc Verna, the theatre director Marine Mane, and lately the pop artist Christine & the Queens and the collective (LA) HORDE.

Performed by Benjamin Bertrand and Eleonore Zurfluh on a musical creation by Florent Colautti.

Courtesy: the artist.

Dania Reymond

Work

Greenland Unrealised

Video Synthesis Image

Year

2013

A Bunun aborigine from Taiwan reads in his language passages of a scenario by Michelangelo Antonioni that was never filmed.

The history of cinema, or rather its non-history, is filled with movies that were never made. One of these is Green Earth by Antonioni, which was printed as a book among the director’s unfilmed scenarios.

The story tells the last days of a community living in an ideal and verdant Greenland that must flee the coming glaciation. The idea isn’t to shoot the director’s scenario but to showcase it as a virtual project via a virtual medium. It’s about creating a sort of archive that doesn’t deny the un- finished status of Antonioni’s project but on the contrary, reinforces and embraces it.

This archive therefore doesn’t go against the catastrophic course of the story (the mov- ie couldn’t be produced, the community must run or die). Instead, it hold at equal dis- tance the disappearance and the non-occurred, the ruin and the utopia that are to me linked to the very nature of the medium.

Dania Reymond

Born in Algiers in 1982. She lives and works between Paris and Angoulême.

Dania Reymond graduated from the Beaux-Arts School of Marseille and Lyon, and from the Fresnoy National Studio of Contemporary Arts. Her films go from experimental videos to art-house fiction. In 2012, she directed Jeanne, her graduation film in the Fresnoy and received the Studiocollector Award. In 2014, her work received the Art Collector Award at the Young Creation Forum. In 2016, she di- rected Le Jardin d’essai, (The Trial Garden),Young Jury Award at the Brive Medium-Length Film Festival. Her films have been selected in festivals such as the FID of Marseille, Côté Court in Pantin or News directors News films, but also in places dedicated to contemporary art. In 2015, the CNAP (National Center for Contemporary Arts) integrates her works to its collection.

Courtesy: The artist

Work

Year

2008

delphinebedel.com

On the Baltic island of Rügen, the Nazi holiday resort of Pro- ra was the first monumental building for mass tourism.

Spreading over 5 kilometres, this building was a significant propaganda instrument of Kraft durch Freude, the organization that ruled all leisure and recreation under the Third Reich.

After World War II, the site was turned into a secret military base and erased from maps for 40 years. Most of the complex is now abandoned, and the building’s future destination remains uncertain.

By implementing consumerism and mass tourism in the daily life of Germany, was Kraft durch Freude a prototype of contemporary tourism?

The chalk cliffs on Rügen — as painted by Friedrich in 1818 — have now fallen into the sea, but the former outlook en- dures as a popular tourist destination. The painting, as a cultural artefact, has established a popular imagery of romantic nature throughout the 20th century, but the interpretation remained controversial due to political prejudice. Friedrich’s legacy is now being reconsidered.

What is the Romantic imagination of nature in relation to tourism today?

Delphine Bedel

Born in France. She lives and works in Amsterdam.

She is the founder of Meta/Books and the Amsterdam Art/Book Fair, as well as Member of the Advisory Board of the Mondriaan Fonds and the German Photography Academy (DFA). Meta/Books, her publishing studio and research platform, is an experimental frame- work to publish art, theory and design and promote a new generation of artists and designers. She (co)curated the path-breaking trilogy on post-colonialism. ‘Shared History /Decolonising the Image’ at W139 and Arti & Amicitiae, Amsterdam, ‘Beyond Paradise’ at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and ‘The Experience of Atopia’ for Breda Photo festival.

Courtesy: The artist

Work

Year

2015

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.

Gérard Fromanger

Born in 1939 in Pontchartrain, 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.

Guillaume Chamahian

Work

No Title (Puzzles)

Puzzles mounted on dibon

Year

2015

guillaumechamahian.com

Following on from his work on the place of Man – victim or persecutor – in international conflicts, Guillaume Chamahian lingers over the iconography of the Al Assad couple, lead- ers of Syria. Bachar and Asma are a modern couple: she buys Louboutin shoes online, he listens to pop music on YouTube. Some of these pictures were taken by the most fa- mous war photographer alive today, James Nachtwey, for the American edition of Vogue magazine.

With Dictator 2.0, the artist updates the contemporary archives that he twists and reinterprets in order to highlight the contradictions of a brutal world in which we are passive actors, incapable of ignoring the atrocities that are not only made public, but instituted as marketing objects displayed on our screens as a result of the most abject fanatical enterprises.

Guillaume Chamahian

Born in 1975. He lives and works in Marseille.

In the continuity of his current work on violence and conflict, and how they are treated by the press, the artist scrutinizes the mass media, questions the information frameworks, captures unexpected historical echoes and hijacks their contents. He wants to "bear witness, point the finger, provide evidence, manage the feed, and think of new formats for these images-spectacles that now automatically flood all our channels of communication and information. In a society that is increasingly settling into a single and spectacular form of thought, where homogeneity is spreading like the plague throughout the media, in politics, and through the proliferation of multinationals, as well as through Orwellian Newspeak, behaviours, entertainment... we must resist. And fight. Artists must embody this counter force."

From the series “Dictateur 2.0”. 4 Puzzles mounted on dibon, 15 x 21 cm.
Courtesy: the artist and LHOSTE ART CONTEMPORAIN.

Guy Limone

Work

25 sur 100 migrants dans le monde sont des marocains

Painted plastic

Year

2009

DD'A Gu Limone

The “Threads” are like abacuses whose balls have been replaced by small sculptures representing characters.

Here, 25 figurines painted with minute detail (The Moroccans) are lost among 1475 others, each one painted a bright color.

I created this sculpture in Mo- rocco, traditionally a country of emigration, but which is increasingly becoming a country of immigration.

A multitude of colors that evoke a great variety of cultures of course, but also the traveling painters that colored Western art through their extensive voyages (Delacroix, Gauguin, Klee...).

A statistic taken from the press is thus visualized, sculpted.

The great length of the thread enables the vertigo that characterizes our world, constantly inventoried and yet elusive.

Guy Limone

Born in 1958 in Villefranche sur Sâone. He lives and works in Paris.

From afar, Guy Limone’s paintings, sculptures, and installations read as minimalist and monochromatic; up close, they reveal an artistic practice centered on obsessions—with demographics and statistics, color and categorization, and miniatures. Taking as his launch point such arbitrary statistics as “160 out of 1000 Americans own a pass- port,” or “18.8% of Greeks are obese,” Limone crafts 3D infographics that visualize this data, usually through the use of tiny, handpainted plastic figurines, strung together or arranged in intricate tabletop tableaux; in his 1996 installation 67,857 inhabitants per sq. mile, he visualized the average share of Manhattan’s land for each of its inhabitants. Working as a taxonomist as much as an artist, Limone also crafts monochromatic collages that mix images of famous artworks with fragments from mass media—asserting an aesthetic order on a world that is inundated with information and imagery.

1500 painted plastic elements (ech 1/87e) threaded on a fishing line 480 cm high. Courtesy: the artist.

mounir fatmi

Work

Archeology

Broom, black flag and two skeletons

Year

2016

mounirfatmi.com

The Archeology installment forces the public to stand at ground level to see the bones of two skeletons that com- pose the piece. The bones are swept up against a wall by a three-meter broom that is carrying a black flag as a banner, representing a memento mori of our time. As life expectancy increases, the violence of conflicts has attained un- precedented ferocity in a few years. The absence of bodies, representing the preceding passage of death, leaves only bones that signify a lost battle. In drawing bitter attention to contemporary society, this work, evoking both the battleground and the excavation site, calls out through its brutality.

As disenchanted vanity in a drifting world, the Archeology installation insists on the loss of meaning and our cultural, structural matrix. The work’s title thus carries the tragedy of human existence as well as regret and guilt in face of to- day’s society. Both fascinating and repulsive, the Archeology installation provokes reflection on the universal evil of a materialistic world. There is only one step between consumption and consummation, and in this piece, they are placed at the same level.

mounir fatmi

Born in Tangiers, Morocco, in 1970. He lives and works between Paris, Lille and Tangiers.

mounir fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games. His work deals with the desecration of religious objects, deconstruction and the end of dogmas and ideologies. He is particularly interested in the idea of the role of the artist in a society in crisis. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires. They directly address the current events of our world, and speak to those whose lives are affected by specific events and reveals its structure. Mounir Fatmi’s work offers a look at the world from a different glance, refusing to be blinded by the conventions.

Courtesy: the artist and Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg.

Nelly agassi

Work

Peel-in

Single-channel video, 4 min 18.

Year

2002

www.nellyagassi.com

“...the body is much more than an instrument or a means; it is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. “

I rub my face softly but firmly with kosher salt. I rub the surface trying to erase mediation, creating a link between the private and public, the quotidian and the symbolic or ceremonial. The salt is painfully cleansing my emotional inner landscape.

I dig-in to travel unfamiliar lands and territories that are mine, that are patched together and stitched out of my biography.
Peel-in is a pun on the cos- metic term “peeling” which denotes the removal of layers of skin to achieve a smooth and young-looking complex- ion. In this work, the inward peeling attempts to reach the emotional nerve center and lay bare the most essential kernel of being.
The action of Peel-in is an ambivalent borderline––marking the relationship between beauty and pain––as the perception of an alchemist where the vulnerable and fragile is also strength.

I work unconstrained and from intuition where an emotion be- comes image.

Nelly Agassi

Born in 1973, Israel. She lives and works in Tel Aviv.

She draws inspiration from the female body, sometimes using her own body and biography as the subject her work. Through this work, Agassi explores and comments on the notion of physical presence especially pertaining to the female identity. Agassi uses self-expression and her own body as an instrument to obtain a universal human language for her audience to understand. Agassi has participated in over ten solo shows internationally since 1997, when she premiered with a project where she knitted a dress around her body. Her work is part of the public collections of The Tel Aviv Art Museum, and the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem.

Courtesy: Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv and Keitelman Gallery, Bruxelles

The Exile Pavilion. Layover 01 - Paris

Titled --------- Exile Pavilion 01. Paris
Publisher ------ SF publishing (Jan. 26, 2020)
Date ----------- January 26, 2020 
Language ------- English 
Length --------- 83 pages

"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 exile as a new space to be reinvented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. It 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, economic problems, and political or racial persecutions."

mounir fatmi, June 2016

The Exile Pavilion. Layover 02 - Marseille

Titled --------- Exile Pavilion 02. Marseille-a part Festival
Publisher ------ SF publishing (Jan. 26, 2020)
Date ----------- January 26, 2020 
Language ------- English 
Length --------- 95 pages

"The reversed exile
Who are the others? That is the question mounir fatmi asks pass- ers-by in his video The Latest In is a Stanger. It echoes that very same question asked by writer Mohammed Dib to a few French philosophers, among which Jacques Derrida, at a time when there wasn’t yet a “jungle” in Calais. You don’t notice the absence of a stranger, writes Philippe Cazal. There are no others. Because we are all the others of one another. That’s what these Nations will nev- er understand, in their satisfied slumber exhibited by Jean-Baptise Audat. The only bearable flags? The mutant ones on which appear the characters presented by ORLAN in ASILE-EXIL. Or the flag of the Refugee Nation, a modern version of the pirate flag, so that our exiles of madmen become journeys that destroy our mental and physical borders, both inside and out. With Groupe UNTEL, let’s laugh at tourists in their shirtsleeves who believe they are home any- where, though their eyes only perceive the veneer of the world. Guy Limone, creating on a thread a brochette of little migrant soldiers, or Pierre Desfons, transforming a computer mouse pad into a prayer rug facing the black sun of the complete disaster that is Isis, both also reverse the notion of exile. Each according to the lights and shadows in their own existence, and therefore in their artworks, the artists of the Exile Pavilion reinvent their own exile, with criticism, distance or delight, against the exile imposed by these powers that torture, expatriate, starve, exploit and decerebrate.
The school of Exile
In the aforementioned Jungle of Calais, precarious housing, as these tents and huts are called, but also hotels, churches and mosques, infirmaries, a theatre and schools were built on sand. Af- ghans, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians and other migrants from Africa and many other places toiled and danced in the wind, together with volunteers from Europe and elsewhere. Be- tween January and November 2016, photographers Anita Pouchard Serra, Laurent Malone and André Mérian were much more than wit- nesses to a desire, a joie de vivre in the here and now, and to the subsequent destruction by political stupidity of this “dream” of an international city. The picture of the torn down sign for the “Chemin des Dunes secular school” is a symbol of this carnage. It contrasts with the beauty of the story of this very school, told by Zimako and Marko in Isabelle Arvers’ machinima Heroic Makers vs. Heroic Land, created with the Moviestorm game engine from photographs and interviews. Is there a school of exile? Rather numerous schools,most of which are metaphorical... Where beautiful characters can be found, such as these “rejects” from a Tunisian camp filmed by Sophie Bachelier and Djibril Dialo... Where one learns to live on a Mezzanine, like Younes Baba-Ali between Marseilles and Tangiers. Where we can also, thanks to another sound piece by Anna Raimon- do and Younes Baba-Ali, experience an interior exile in the dark, “to lose oneself and perhaps find oneself.”
The transfiguration of exile
To what extent can the notion of exile be reinvented? Are these feet of Mexican artist Beatriz Canfield the bare extremities of hanged anonymous migrants? Or on the contrary, are they legs in zero grav- ity, transfiguring exile by ascending to the sky? Is there a more ab- solute exile than that of the astronaut in the galactic void? Interior Telescope was the first sculpture ever created in a space station. Eduardo Kac enabled French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to build it in space, with paper and scissors, following a procedure that was tested at length on Earth. Another inconceivable metaphor for exile: Fabien Zocco’s installation juxtaposes the name of a star such as Al- debaran, Proxima or Vega with the picture of a place with the same name on Google Street View. The dream of exile in other galaxies ends up in a pathetic locality on our planet. Unless it’s this mediocre territory that’s inviting us to dream of stars? What these artists are telling us about, like the migrants of Calais, is the urgency to trans- figure, to dream of exile beyond the clichés and constraints forced upon us by the powers that be."

Proposed by mounir fatmi

Ariel Kyrou

The Exile Pavilion. Layover 03 - Saint Louis

Titled --------- Exile Pavilion 03. Saint Louis Institut Français
Publisher ------ SF publishing (Jan. 26, 2020)
Date ----------- January 26, 2020 
Language ------- English 
Length --------- 112 pages

"Saint-Louis of Senegal. A city I visited in 2000, on the occasion of my first participation in the Dakar biennale. That same year, the city was classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It was founded by Europeans in West Africa in 1659, and named Saint-Louis in honor of the king of France Louis XIV, after his ancestor king Saint Louis. It must be reminded that the city was often called the “Venice of Afri- ca” and that it was one of the most important centers for the trade of gold, ivory and, above all, slaves.
In the painting “Scene of a Shipwreck”, better known as “The Raft of the Medusa”, French painter Théodore Géricault immortalized a tragic episode in the history of the French navy, the wreck of the frigate Medusa that was transporting civil servants and soldiers to what would become the colony of Senegal. After enduring hunger, madness and even cannibalism, only a handful of men eventually set foot in Saint Louis. The sea swallowing up men, a story as old as time that reminds us how humanity was always interested in ques- tions of migration and nomadism.
The verb “to migrate” comes from the Indo-European term “meigw”, meaning to change, but also to move, to go towards something. This became the Latin word “migrare”, which applied specifically to moving house. “Nomad” is a Greek term for “shep- herd”, because shepherds have to follow their flocks. And lastly, the word “exile”, from the Latin “ex-solum”, meaning “coming from the ground” or “out of the ground”.
As artists, are we ungrounded by default, since our work is destined to travel and that we are often forced to follow it? It’s in this context that we set up in Saint-Louis of Senegal to prepare a stopover of the Exile Pavilion project, with the help of about 30 Senegalese and in- ternational artists who agreed to embark upon this journey with us.
"

mounir fatmi

Curator of the exhibition

Statement. Layover 01.

The Exile Pavillon. Layover 01 Paris

National Archives Museum

“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 exile as a new space to be re- invented, to be rethought and finally to be invested. It 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, economic problems, and political or racial persecutions.

The Exile Pavilion will make its first stop in the French National Ar- chives Museum in Paris, a city that was home to some of the leading avant-garde artists of the twentieth century during a time in which exile led to lasting artistic changes and developments. In the cur- rent issues of identity and migration, it is important to highlight the depth of artwork and creativity produced during this movement. If exile is a chance, then is to return a fantasy? This first layover of Exile Pavilion proposes to confront this idea directly and will feature several leading contemporary artists who explore this issue in their work.

The exhibition will offer a range of work and artistic interventions set throughout the antechamber and in the windows of the National Archives Museum and will include a special video program in the projection room.

mounir fatmi, June 30, 2016

Curator
Mounir fatmi

Project Assistant
Laura Pandolfo

Thanks to
Françoise Banat-Berger, Archives Nationales de Paris, mounir fatmi, Romain Tichit, YIA Art Fair, Ali Assaf, Benjamin Bertrand, Carlos Aires, Dan Perjovschi, Dania Reymond, Delphine Bedel, Gérard Fromanger, Guillaume Chamahian, Guy Limone, mounir fatmi, Nelly Agassi, Nelson Pernisco, Nikos Charalambidis, Orlando Britto Jinorio, Said Afifi, Blaire Dessent, Patrick Haour, Marie Christine Gailloud-Matthieu, Joede Chraa, Marc Mercier, Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Nicole Brenez, Barbara Polla, Nabil Chraa, Jane Lombard New York, Thierry Destriez, Thierry Raspail, Sam Bardaouil, Till Briegleb, Sandra Dagher, Nicole Gingras, Lina Laazar, Paolo Colombo, Agnès Violeau, Christian Alandete, Franck Hermann Ekra, Ali Akay, Elvira Dyangani, Brahim Alaoui, Goodman Gal- lery, Johannesburg, Cape Town.

Statement. Layover 02.

The Exile Pavillon. Layover 02 Marseille

A-part Festival

Proposed by mounir fatmi

The reversed exile

Who are the others? That is the question mounir fatmi asks pass- ers-by in his video The Latest In is a Stanger. It echoes that very same question asked by writer Mohammed Dib to a few French philosophers, among which Jacques Derrida, at a time when there wasn’t yet a “jungle” in Calais. You don’t notice the absence of a stranger, writes Philippe Cazal. There are no others. Because we are all the others of one another. That’s what these Nations will nev- er understand, in their satisfied slumber exhibited by Jean-Baptise Audat. The only bearable flags? The mutant ones on which appear the characters presented by ORLAN in ASILE-EXIL. Or the flag of the Refugee Nation, a modern version of the pirate flag, so that our exiles of madmen become journeys that destroy our mental and physical borders, both inside and out. With Groupe UNTEL, let’s laugh at tourists in their shirtsleeves who believe they are home any- where, though their eyes only perceive the veneer of the world. Guy Limone, creating on a thread a brochette of little migrant soldiers, or Pierre Desfons, transforming a computer mouse pad into a prayer rug facing the black sun of the complete disaster that is Isis, both also reverse the notion of exile. Each according to the lights and shadows in their own existence, and therefore in their artworks, the artists of the Exile Pavilion reinvent their own exile, with criticism, distance or delight, against the exile imposed by these powers that torture, expatriate, starve, exploit and decerebrate.

The school of Exile

In the aforementioned Jungle of Calais, precarious housing, as these tents and huts are called, but also hotels, churches and mosques, infirmaries, a theatre and schools were built on sand. Af- ghans, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians and other migrants from Africa and many other places toiled and danced in the wind, together with volunteers from Europe and elsewhere. Be- tween January and November 2016, photographers Anita Pouchard Serra, Laurent Malone and André Mérian were much more than wit- nesses to a desire, a joie de vivre in the here and now, and to the subsequent destruction by political stupidity of this “dream” of an international city. The picture of the torn down sign for the “Chemin des Dunes secular school” is a symbol of this carnage. It contrasts with the beauty of the story of this very school, told by Zimako and Marko in Isabelle Arvers’ machinima Heroic Makers vs. Heroic Land, created with the Moviestorm game engine from photographs and interviews. Is there a school of exile? Rather numerous schools,most of which are metaphorical… Where beautiful characters can be found, such as these “rejects” from a Tunisian camp filmed by Sophie Bachelier and Djibril Dialo… Where one learns to live on a Mezzanine, like Younes Baba-Ali between Marseilles and Tangiers. Where we can also, thanks to another sound piece by Anna Raimon- do and Younes Baba-Ali, experience an interior exile in the dark, “to lose oneself and perhaps find oneself.”

The transfiguration of exile

To what extent can the notion of exile be reinvented? Are these feet of Mexican artist Beatriz Canfield the bare extremities of hanged anonymous migrants? Or on the contrary, are they legs in zero grav- ity, transfiguring exile by ascending to the sky? Is there a more ab- solute exile than that of the astronaut in the galactic void? Interior Telescope was the first sculpture ever created in a space station. Eduardo Kac enabled French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to build it in space, with paper and scissors, following a procedure that was tested at length on Earth. Another inconceivable metaphor for exile: Fabien Zocco’s installation juxtaposes the name of a star such as Al- debaran, Proxima or Vega with the picture of a place with the same name on Google Street View. The dream of exile in other galaxies ends up in a pathetic locality on our planet. Unless it’s this mediocre territory that’s inviting us to dream of stars? What these artists are telling us about, like the migrants of Calais, is the urgency to trans- figure, to dream of exile beyond the clichés and constraints forced upon us by the powers that be.

Ariel Kyrou

—

Curator
mounir fatmi

Project Assistant
Laura Pandolfo

Thanks to

Ariel Kyrou, Leïla Voight, mounir fatmi, Festival a-part, André Mérian, Anna Rai- mondo, Anita Pouchard-Serra, Beatriz Canfield, Djibril Diallo, Eduardo Kac, Fabien Zocco, Gérard Fromanger, Guy Limone, Isabelle Arvers, Jean-Baptiste Audat, Laurent Malone, mounir fatmi, ORLAN, Phillippe Cazal, PEROU, Sophie Bachelier, Un- tel, Yara Said, Younes Baba Ali, Blaire Dessent, Patrick Haour, Marie Christine Gailloud-Mat- thieu, Joede Chraa, Marc Mer- cier, Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Nicole Brenez, Barbara Polla, Nabil Chraa, Jane Lombard New York, Thierry Destriez, Thierry Raspail, Sam Bardaouil, Till Briegleb, Sandra Dagher, Nicole Gingras, Lina Laazar, Paolo Colombo, Agnès Violeau, Christian Alan- dete , Franck Hermann Ekra, Ali Akay, Elvira Dyangani, Bra- him Alaoui, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, Cape Town.

Statement. Layover 03.

The Exile Pavilion
Layover 03 Saint Louis

Saint-Louis of Senegal. A city I visited in 2000, on the occasion of my first participation in the Dakar biennale. That same year, the city was classified by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. It was founded by Europeans in West Africa in 1659, and named Saint-Louis in honor of the king of France Louis XIV, after his ancestor king Saint Louis. It must be reminded that the city was often called the “Venice of Afri- ca” and that it was one of the most important centers for the trade of gold, ivory and, above all, slaves.

In the painting “Scene of a Shipwreck”, better known as “The Raft of the Medusa”, French painter Théodore Géricault immortalized a tragic episode in the history of the French navy, the wreck of the frigate Medusa that was transporting civil servants and soldiers to what would become the colony of Senegal. After enduring hunger, madness and even cannibalism, only a handful of men eventually set foot in Saint Louis. The sea swallowing up men, a story as old as time that reminds us how humanity was always interested in ques- tions of migration and nomadism.

The verb “to migrate” comes from the Indo-European term “meigw”, meaning to change, but also to move, to go towards something. This became the Latin word “migrare”, which applied specifically to moving house. “Nomad” is a Greek term for “shep- herd”, because shepherds have to follow their flocks. And lastly, the word “exile”, from the Latin “ex-solum”, meaning “coming from the ground” or “out of the ground”.

As artists, are we ungrounded by default, since our work is destined to travel and that we are often forced to follow it? It’s in this context that we set up in Saint-Louis of Senegal to prepare a stopover of the Exile Pavilion project, with the help of about 30 Senegalese and in- ternational artists who agreed to embark upon this journey with us.

mounir fatmi
Curator of the exhibition

Curator :
Marie Deparis-Yafil and mounir fatmi

Project Assistant:
Laura Pandolfo

Thanks to :

Marie Deparis-Yafil, mounir fatmi, Institut Français du Sénégal - Saint Louis, Bien- nale de Dakar, Marc Monsal- lier, Ali Assaf, Anna Raimondo, Brankica Zilovic, Groupe Untel, Curtis Santiago, Dimitri Fagbo- houn, El Hadji Keit, Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, Farah Khelil, Ndari Lo, Gohar Dashti, Hank Willis Thomas, Yara Saïd, Ken- dell Geers, Marco Godinho, Mo- hamed El Baz, Mona Hatoum, Omar Victor Diop, Philippe Cazal, Sadek Rahim, Jamila Lamrani, Sophie Bachelier-Dji- bril Diallo, Younès Baba Ali, Blaire Dessent, Patrick Haour, Marie Christine Gailloud-Mat- thieu, Joede Chraa, Marc Mer- cier, Pierre-Olivier Rollin, Nicole Brenez, Barbara Polla, Nicolas Jacquet, Jane Lombard New York, Thierry Destriez, Thier- ry Raspail, Sam Bardaouil, Till Briegleb, Sandra Dagher, Nicole Gingras, Lina Laazar, Paolo Co- lombo, Agnès Violeau, Chris- tian Alandete , Franck Hermann Ekra, Ali Akay, Elvira Dyangani, Brahim Alaoui, Goodman Gal- lery, Johannesburg, Cape Town.