by Author5 | Jan 31, 2021
by Author5 | Jan 31, 2021
by Author5 | Jan 31, 2021
by Author5 | Jan 31, 2021
by Author5 | Jan 31, 2021
Notes #1
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.
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
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
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.
National Archives Museum
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.
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.
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.
Courtesy: The artist
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.
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.
Sweet dreams are made of this Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the sev- en seas,
Everybody’s looking for some- thing.
Some of them want to use you
Some of them want to get used by you
Some of them want to abuse you
Some of them want to be abused.
Sweet dreams are made of this Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the sev- en seas
Everybody’s looking for some- thing.
Hold your head up
Keep your head up,
movin’ on Hold your head up,
movin’ on Keep your head up,
movin’ on
Sweet dreams are made of this Who am I to disagree?
I travel the world and the sev- en seas
Everybody’s looking for some- thing.
Carlos Aires
Born in 1974 in Spain. He lives and works in Madrid.
His work incorporates photography, sculpture and installation with a fun and festive aesthetic behind which lies a content of social and political critique. He uses icons from the Spanish tradition, such as bullfighters and dwarfs, as well as images of historical and contem- porary characters, together with other anonymous figures taken from the media, and incorporates written messages and musical referenc- es to popular culture that suggest poetry, beauty and denunciation.
Courtesy: The artist
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
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.
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.
On the 18 topsy-turvy little pieces of this Boulevard des Italiens, the characters, bright shadows of our daily lives, are upside down, lost, cloned or reversed, as if they were ex- iled from themselves and from their brothers and sisters of the street. Are they the Ital- ians on this Parisian boulevard, strangely integrated or disinte- grated, that haven’t been Ital- ian for a long time?
These peculiar miniature pic- tures, open for interpretation, are extremely modern. They connect the yesterday, today and tomorrow of the A-part Festival. They connect the Exile Pavilion with the festi- val’s theme of lost paradises, whose poster, designed by Gérard Fromanger like every year since 2010, was rejected by the mayor of Les Baux-de- Provence in 2017, as if he him- self was becoming one of the vibrating shadows of life, and so the painter was exiled from the medieval village. Or rather, this is his own lost paradise, an erotic dance of black on red, the colours of melancholy and of the most physical love, that was erased from the Prince Rainier Garden in Monaco, open to the four winds and to everyone. It’s impossible not to see in this sad form of censor- ship the symbol of a time that is now governed by fear. The fear of offending passers-by. The fear of facing the reality of bodies, our bodies during pleasure or those of migrants in makeshift camps. The fear of accepting our lapses in pleas- ure or violence, even when they are transfigured by art.
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 became 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 Pop- ulaire at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he also produced various collective and political serigraphy works during the May 1968 events.
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.
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.
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.
“...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
Nelson Pernisco
Born in 1993, in Saint-Ouen. He lives and works in Saint-Ouen.
From urban squats to industrial wastelands, the visual artist took it upon itself to discover the various means of occupying territories, of constructing housings and the way they act as a catalyst for political orders. His aesthetic is dry and in some way, brutalist. He relies on re- cycling poor and recovered materials, presented as touchstones of a world that may already be in ruins, and is at best under never-ending construction. Borrowed from the urban environment, from industrial properties or from the realm of technology, these figments are used in his work to reflect the precariousness of time and the urgency of rethinking forms.
Courtesy: The artist
Nikos Charalambidis
Born in 1969 in Canada. He lives and works in Greece.
He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and continued his studies in sculpture at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He completed his postgraduate studies in Digital Art, and obtained a Master’s degree in Robotics. He has realised over fifteen one- man shows in Greece and other countries and participated in sev- eral international exhibitions, festivals, conferences and biennials. Charalambidis represented Cyprus at the 50th Venice Biennale of Art, as well as the 47th Venice Biennale of Art together with three other Cypriot artists.
Courtesy: the artist.
Red Indian is a project of Orlando Britto Jinorio, with the collaboration of photographer Jorge Cembranos, which ex- plored through photography and video performance issues concerning identity, freedom, transformation processes and empathy with the “other”.
For it draws on his imaginary constructions related to his childhood, the encounter with the years with a toy, a small plastic figure of a Red Indian, also setting a match-tribute with texts of two writers, Franz Kafka and Leopoldo Maria Panero, that have addressed issues of loss, desire and trans- formation.
Franz Kafka wrote in 1913 the text “The wish to be a Red Indi- an” included in the collection of stories of his “Contempla- tions”, text that takes the title Spanish poet Leopoldo Maria Panero to publish in 1970 an eponymous poem included in his famous work “So Carnaby Street was founded.” (“Así se fundó Carnaby Street”).
Orlando Britto Jinorio gener- ates in this action spaces of empathy and reconciliation with those many others Red- skins who lived his childhood.
Orlando Britto Jinorio
Born in 1963 in the Canary Islands, Spain. Lives in Spain, and works in the Canary Islands, Spain, and internationally.
Trained as an art historian at the University of Granada, Spain, (1981- 1986) specializes in contemporary art, and works since 1987 as con- temporary art curator and art critic. Along with his specific artistic collaborations which artists who has been heavily linked in recent years, he decided in 2013 start making his own artistic work build- ing with a group of collaborators the experimental short film “Suite Ruin”, his first artistic Project. This shortfilm was finalist on 2014 at the Mumbai Short Film festivals, Noida Film Festival in India, the Salón Internacional de la Luz de Bogotá and the Video Festival Intermedi- aciones in Medellín, Colombia.
Courtesy: the artist and Maëlle Galerie, Paris.
“I always considered that an ancient context such as the Tetouan medina was sort of like a museum: an obsolete environment that is no longer inhabitable. I often observe these tourists who come from around the world to enjoy, with a certain emotion, this ambiguous journey through time and space. The fact I see things this way is probably due to the fact I was born and grew up in a neighbourhood that is completely different from the urban setting of the medina. So I really wanted to embody one of these protagonists in an imaginary medieval scenario.
For the past three years, I have oriented my research to- wards architecture and urban- ism. With my works, I create a sort of phantasmagorical fic- tion that is also a story in the news. The way in which the real estate sector plays a part in the current economic and social crisis concerns me, and I reflected upon the usefulness of building and demolishing, upon architecture and its rela- tions to religion, politics, the economy, etc.
The project I developed dur- ing my residency is called New Mythology. Since I’m pushing my aesthetic research towards illusion, the impalpability of reality and the spectacular ab- surdity, I worked according to a paradox that turns the medi- na into an ultra-modern urban fabric: like some sort of mem- ory/transformation that we didn’t experience.”
Said Afifi
Born in 1983 in Casablanca, he lives and works in Tetouan.
Since 2012, Said Afifi has explored the tenets of postmodernist archi- tecture, often adding a chaotic and utopian dimension to the genre, drawing outlines of a cold and sterile aesthetic. While maintaining a position of observer, he tries to question the political, social and eco- nomic circumstances that have led to the advent of ultra-modernist architecture. In the Donatella series, Afifi evokes the issues behind chirurgical procedures that are planned as architectural process, and the impact of this pursuit of a perfect aesthetic on the evolution of human species.
Courtesy: The artist
André Mérian
Born in 1955, in Le Faouët. He lives and works in Marseille.
He come to Marseille in 1987. He knew almost nothing about the Mediterranean horizon, and it ended up changing his worldview radically. After a period of maladjustment and self-questioning, he began to work on Marseille’s coastline, the result if which were blurry, grey pictures and a desire to escape a certain reality. A few years later, he joined the association Sud Image Territoire, which led him to tackle the subject of “a new geography” – the landscape and its territory, its transformation and its evolution, alternated with its human aspect. He remains very sensitive to the issue of the place of people in these spaces. He remains at a distance in his approach of reality in order to convey tension, emptiness, and even loss. For him, photography is a way of thinking, living, and self-questioning.
Anita Pouchard-Serra
Born in 1985, she lives and works between Paris, Buenos Aires and Latin-America.
As a self-taught photographer at the beginning, she finally graduat- ed in photojournalism from ARGRA Escuela in Buenos Aires (Association of Graphic Reporters of Argentina) and Specialization in documentary photography from the University of Buenos Aires and she have received a scholarship from the Foundation Pedro Meyer and World Press Photo to follow the program “Fotonarrativa y Nuevos Medios” in Mexico. Her work revolves around questions and territo- ries that cross her personally, connected with current societal prob- lems around identity, migration, empowerment and territory with a transdisciplinary approach. Talk about actuality but on a longer time or to bring other lights. She worked with collectives Ojo de Pez and Compromiso Fotografico (AR) giving workshops of photojournalism in the underprivileged neighborhoods of Buenos Aires and Paroles de Photographe (FR) and as a teacher in several schools.
How far can we reinvent the concept of exile? Are these feet by Mexican artist Beat- riz Canfield the bare ends of anonymous migrants, hung high and short? Or are they the opposite of gravity-free legs, transfiguring exile as they rise to the sky?
Anonymous is an essay on vi- olence and brutality, not as isolated acts, but as the violent act itself and its psychological implications.
Violence as a universal emo- tional archetype and dual di- rection arrow: what we con- stantly receive and internalize in the form of fear and resent- ment and what we give back in the form of anger, which often becomes chronic.
Beatriz Canfield
Born in 1972 in Mexico City. She lives and works in Mexico City.
Graduated from the National School of Painting, Sculpture and En- graving La Esmeralda. Visual Artist with a wide range of records that includes Sculpture, video installation and photography. Her work has been exhibited in numerous individual and collective exhibitions both in Mexico City and abroad, Spain, France, England, Switzer- land, among others. The practice proposed by Canfield forces the sculpture to interact with other manifestations, leading to an ex- panded sculpture practice, which is required in the process section of explosives, photography and video with 4k technology, to finally make all of it an installation of both photographic and video record of the detonation process as of the state of the object / sculpture after the intervention of the explosives, ruins of the matter gener- ated by a sculptural practice in times of war, in a generalized state of siege.
Eduardo Kac
Born in 1962, in Rio de Janeiro. He lives and works in USA.
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ‘80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) emerged in the early ‘90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online expe- rience (Uirapuru) to the cultural impact of biotechnology (Genesis); from the changing condition of memory in the digital age (Time Capsule) to distributed collective agency (Teleporting an Unknown State); from the problematic notion of the “exotic” (Rara Avis) to the creation of life and evolution (GFP Bunny).
Fabien Zocco
Fabien Zocco graduated from the Fresnoy-National Studio of Con- temporary Arts in 2016. He explores the plastic potential of comput- erized dematerialization, applications and other software.
Playing with the infinite possibilities offered by the digital network, he uses the icons of digital popular culture and virtual aesthetics to create futuristic architectures, forms or narratives. Not without a touch of derision, he questions our relationship to new technologies that have invaded our daily lives and probe our relationship to the virtual.
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.
Courtesy: the artist.
The “Threads” are like aba- cuses 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 in- creasingly becoming a country of immigration.
A multitude of colors that evoke a great variety of cul- tures of course, but also the traveling painters that color- ed 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 char- acterizes 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 infograph- ics that visualize this data, usually through the use of tiny, handpaint- ed 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 in- habitants. 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.
Courtesy: the artist.
The question I ask myself, what I want to understand, is how to live in the jungle, how to restore its humanity, how to create spaces for living and sharing together. How to do the work of a government that shuns it, that refuses to see the urgency of the situation, that focuses instead on “reducing” the number of immigrants in Calais, without ever taking into account the dignity of those in transit, who seek not asylum but to cross the Channel to the UK as soon as possible. In a little less than a year togeth- er, the refugees of the jungle have built what has become a city-world. These everyday he- roes are not only able to meet most community needs, they introduce a fledgling politi- cal model, based on decisions made from the representative of each community present, which are heard by NGOs, with all due respect to the needs, expectations and voices of the residents.
I chose the medium of video games to translate my inter- views of these jungle resi- dents and give them another dimension. The excerpts pre- sented here refer to building the Chemin des Dunes school. Zimako Jones, the project’s in- stigator and an asylum seeker from Nigeria, was assisted by volunteers and “brothers”. One of these is Marko, a Kurd- ish man who has been in the jungle for more than 11 weeks. He is helping Zimako finalize the construction of what he calls a forum, a place for meet- ing, exchange and learning for children, as well as for adults.
Isabelle Arvers
Born in 1972 in Paris. She lives and works in Marseille.
She is a French media art curator, critic and author, specializing in video and computer games, web animation, digital cinema. She curated exhibitions in France and worldwide on the relationship between art, video and computer games and politics. She also promotes free and open source culture as well as indie games and art games. In the second half of the 2000s, her growing interest in Machinima (films created with video games using a 3D graphics engine 3D) led her to create important interactive workshops and exhibitions in France, as well as in the Czech Republic, Canada and Brazil. Her recent activ- ities include curating the exhibitions “antiAtlas of Borders” (2013), “Art of Bordering” (2014) and “End of the map Exhibition” (2015) in Berlin, Rome and Paris.
Courtesy: the artist.
A mattress.
Single, 90 centimetres.
All the flags in the world are represented, printed.
The mattress is on a bed base made of metal grids in which are inserted articles from the newspaper Le Monde.
Stock markets, pension funds, health, companies, profits, in- vestments... stacked one me- ter high.
To sleep on a mattress of cash, dough, moolah.
Jean-Baptiste Audat
Born in 1950 in Bourges (Cher). He lives and works in Marseille and Africa.
The work of Jean Baptiste Audat is marked by current affairs: politics, economics, ecology, wars and tragedies. So many sources of inspi- ration for a polymorphous work in which drawing, installation and performance combine. Deeply influenced by the African continent, he draws from it an approach of creation based on recovery and resourcefulness. His works speak of the war in Syria, textile factories burned in Bangladesh, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The artist cap- tures these dramas, digest them and we retransmit them, highlighting the voices of the nameless.
Courtesy: the artist.
Laurent Malone
Born in 1948 in Lyon. He lives and works in Paris.
Photographer, he carries out a work of analysis and documentation of the mutations of the urban space from courses traced in the cities. The cities are the place of a balance of power between the rationality embodied by architecture and the uses of the inhabitants who invent “ruses” and “ways of doing with” to reclaim the space. The most common of these arts to make “the march”, by the free arrangement of the elements of the geometric space of the cities crossed in a course, transforms the imposed order into a lived space. These observations of the public space constantly bring back the urban architecture to the scale of human occupation, thus allowing a necessary mutation of the gaze on the phenomena, of exclu.
Courtesy: The artist
Who are other people? That seemingly simple question was inspired to the artist by the question the Algerian writer Mohammed Dib asked a few French philosophers, among which Jacques Derrida. For mounir fatmi, the idea is to take this classic philosophical question out of its intellectual context and confront it to the streets. So here it is, hand- ed over to the people in the streets of Paris and Mantes la Jolie, a Parisian suburb. The answers are laconic, evasive, tender, conniving, sometimes philosophical. They are also everything and anything, ap- parently obvious and neverthe- less ambivalent. From “there are no others” to “everyone is another”, what passers-by say reveals the delicate ambiguity of any definition, with the risk of permanently being ignorant of one’s fellow human being, whether it’s because we deny his difference or because we generously perceive him as similar, and underlines the diffi- culty of giving a precise mean- ing to what alterity really is.
This video questions the way each one of us, according to our experiences, our spontane- ity, perceives this double struc- ture of the same and the other, the other than me and at the same time the other me, this “myself that nothing separates me from (...) other than its pure and total freedom”*, and the essential reversibility of this assertion. The Others are the Others engages in a reflec- tion that spans all the artist’s work about the constitution of identity.
mounir fatmi
Born in 1970 in Tangiers, Morocco. 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 Analix Forever, Geneva.
The memory of a country is political, social and cultural. Its people isn’t an ethnic group but a construct elaborated through waves of migration. I worked with undocumented migrants and asylum seekers, first in Belgium and then in Marseilles, contacted by asso- ciations in order to be photo- graphed and filmed.
The video shown in a loop in the Exile Pavilion was created in its initial version for the “Ici et ailleurs” exhibit during the Marseilles European Capital event (curated by Juliette Laf- fon). I asked immigrants from around the Mediterranean and settled in Marseilles to relate their crossing of the sea, their journey and their relationship with their country of origin. Then, taking my inspiration from the stories of their dis- placements, I hybridized with flags/sheets the entirety of the journeys accomplished. Super- imposing them, I placed their portraits in the center of the image and played the hybrid- ized flags in slow motion, hav- ing rendered the videos trans- parent in order to transform their faces and paint them one after the other.
The result is a video in which each one of these individuals seems to be in the middle of a dream for change and a desire for displacement. Poetry and philosophy animate their fac- es differently and reveal their hopes, their thoughts and their pain.
ORLAN
Born in 1947 in Saint-Étienne. She lives and work in France.
ORLAN based her artistic practice on the appropriation of aesthetic ideals of the past on which to reshape his body with plastic surgery. From the beginning of the 1990s, the French artist underwent continuous surgery to alter her face and body, choosing each time, from famous masterpieces of art from the Renaissance, the features to be assumed. She wanted to recreate the forehead of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and the chin like that of the Venus by Bot- ticelli. The artist stages operations as artistic installations, public performances often accompanied by music, poetry readings and dances. Polyhedral artist who ranges from performances to urban art, from installations to videos and sculpture, ORLAN has become the spokesperson for an entire artistic trend that claims the need to humanize the body.
Courtesy: the artist.
This text is a manifest: for the recognition of what was destroyed with the so-called Jungle of Calais; so that its surge of vitality and joy can be reborn somewhere else; so that the “36,001st French municipality” lives on, the mu- nicipality of hospitality. This appeal was written by Sébast- ien Thiéry for PEROU, or Pôle d’Exploration des Ressources Urbaines (Center for the Ex- ploration of Urban Resources), which he coordinates. PEROU is one of the instigators (with agrafmobile) of Réiventer Cal- ais, “the Other news magazine of the city of Calais”, a fake issue of Calais Mag published in April 2016, with 4,000 cop- ies distributed in the streets of Calais... the consequence of which was a legal procedure by the city against PEROU for plagiarism.
www.perou-paris.org
PEROU
Association law 1901 founded in September 2012, PEROU is a re- search-action laboratory on the hostile city designed to articulate social and architectural action in response to the surrounding dan- ger, and renew knowledge and know-how on the issue. Referring to the fundamental European rights of the person and the “right to the city” that results from it, PERU is a tool at the service of the multitude of undesirables, commonly counted as social or even ethnic cases, but never considered as inhabitants in their own right.
Courtesy: The artist
On ne remarque pas l’absence d’un inconnu (“You don’t no- tice a stranger’s absence”): the sentence rings like a slogan and like a self-evident fact. Using the codes of mass com- munication, such as posters, a widely used communication tool, Philippe Cazal constructs a semantic body of work that is simple and powerful, poetic and political.
In the context of the Exile Pa- vilion, this manifesto resonates with an entire ethical reflection on the close and the distant, the value given to “the oth- er who has a face” or to “the other that I will never see”, as French philosopher Paul Ricoeur would say. Who is he and did he ever even exist, he who dies between borders or on a shore, and that I have never known nor even looked in the eye?
In the same spirit of urban in- terventions, Je veux une suite et pas une fin (“I want a con- tinuation and not an end”), which can be interpreted as a refugee’s cry of hope, is paint- ed with a stencil on the outside wall of the gallery.
Philippe Cazal
Born in 1948 in La Redorte. He lives and works in France.
Philippe Cazal is a French artist whose practice of misusing the codes of the world of advertising and marketing produces a critical discourse on the city, politics, economy and society but also on the place that occupies today the artist.
His work has been exhibited many times, including the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Par- is, the Barbican Center in London, the FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon but also the Villa Park in Annemasse.
After studying at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, he created with Jean-Paul Albi- net and Alain Snyers in 1975 (joined in 1978 by Wilfrid Rouff) group UNTEL. This group of artists proposes to examine our daily life and its banality as well as public space in a series of actions and interventions, often performed in the street, inviting the public to rethink the world. At the Biennale de Paris in 1977, they invest the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris with Daily Life, a department store type environment where more than two thousand objects of every- day life are presented under vacuum. By targeting consumerism, this fake self-service questions the habit.
Courtesy: the artist.
Created in 2017 for the perfor- mance-exhibit “The Absence of Paths” for the Tunisian pa- vilion of the 57th Venice Bien- nale that addressed the status of the migrant in the world, Rejected is a series of twelve one-minute video portraits filmed at the camp of Choucha in Southern Tunisia. This camp, located near the Libyan bor- der, was opened in 2011 dur- ing the Libyan war and accom- modated up to 18,000 people, among which many refugees, or “third party nationals”, who had immigrated to Libya but couldn’t go back there nor to their country of origin, and therefore had nowhere to go.
Shut down in 2013 by the UN High Commissioner for Ref- ugees, the camp of Choucha continued to exist nonethe- less, as a few dozen people stayed on the site, demanding the revision of their rejected asylum applications. In June 2017, they were removed by the local authorities.
These twelve portraits filmed in 2013, shortly before the dis- mantling of the camp, almost motionless and silent, put us simply and powerfully face to face with these men, women and children fighting for sur- vival, waiting, in this sort of heterotopia, this place outside of common reality that is a ref- ugee camp.
Sophie Bachelier
Sophie Bachelier is a photographer and filmmaker, a graduate in Decorative Arts from Paris who also holds a Master’s degree in Eth- nology. She is interested in how the collective history meshes with in- dividual destinies and transforms them. Her work focuses on themes of memory, wandering, exile and their traces; it privileges the actual words, and the silences, of the people she meets over commentary. Her film “MBËKK Mi, the breath of the ocean” about illegal emigra- tion in Senegal as seen by those wives and mothers who remain on the shore, received special mention for Best Feature-length Docu- mentary from the Anna Politkovskaya Jury at the 30th Créteil Wom- en’s Film Festival. Her film “CHOUCHA, an unfathomable indiffer- ence” received the prize for best.
Courtesy: the artist.
In 1978, Groupe UNTEL, com- prising three French artists from the post-1968 “Nouvelle Vague”, created a performance entitled Tourist. It consisted in walking through the streets of Cahors (a touristic town in south-western France), two of them getting their picture taken by passers-by while the whole scene was simultaneous- ly photographed by the third one. Each member of the trio (Jean-Paul Albinet, Philippe Cazal and Wilfrid Rouff) wore a TOURIST outfit: a white paint- er overall and a t-shirt, with the French word TOURISTE printed on them, with various fonts and colours, and badges as well.
On 16 October 1978, during their FASHION SHOW perfor- mance in the Great Gallery of the Louvre, UNTEL present- ed its TOURISTE collection. In 2015, the performance was reactivated, and consequent- ly a limited series of “Touriste shirts” was produced.
Since 1978, the context has changed. UNTEL still ques- tions the act of consumerism, but also the work of the gal- lery owner/producer, as well as artists’ new strategies, their daily work seeming to have evolved. The economic weight of tourism has also grown, with globalization and new geopo- litical evolutions. The complex issues of the tourism industry have become crucial and the world of contemporary art is involved as well, from the Ven- ice Biennale to the Louvre in Abu Dhabi.
Untel
UNTEL is a group of artists originally formed by Jean-Paul Albinet, Philippe Cazal and Alain Snyers (Wilfrid Rouff takes the place of Alain Snyers following the departure of the latter in 1978) whose existence is brief but passionate, from 1975 to 1980, gave life to many actions in the public space. The common denominator of these actions is the investigation of the everyday, social and political investigation, for critical purposes, very imbued with the protest ideas of May 1968 and the situationist thinking. The group carries out a critical analysis of the society in its contradictions and proceeds to a permanent implementation of all the means at its disposal, by seizing the materials that exist in the everyday life and by carrying out interventions in the urban space.
Courtesy:Mfc Michèle Didier and private collection.
The Refugee Nation is an in- dependent solidarity organiza- tion for refugees from around the world that was originally created to implement and support a team for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. They needed a flag: Yara Saïd, a young Syrian artist living as a refugee in Amsterdam, im- agined this one.
“The black and the orange are a symbol of solidarity with all the courageous souls who had to wear life vests in order to cross the sea and seek safety in a new country. I wore one. I have a personal connection with these vests that bear those two colours”, explains Yara Saïd.
The flag, and an anthem: these are the first two official crea- tions of the Refugee Nation, two symbols of union for a sin- gle cause or common values, two symbols of identity whose traces can be found in other artworks present in the exhib- it. This flag, in all its simplicity and visual efficiency, has be- come a very powerful symbol and was recognized as one of the world’s best design crea- tions in 2016.
Yara Said
Born in 1991 in Sweida, Syria. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Yara Said graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, in 2014. During and after her studies she worked as an art teacher for children. The artist has participated in several workshops and exhibitions with renowned artists, such as Edward Shahda and Nizar Sabour. She likes to clarify how time affects people and the surrounding materials, either this material is a painting, a sculpture, the progress of a video art or a human being. Keeping in mind the relationship of forms within space, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, this broad concept is still the main concern in her artistic research that she tries to reflect in her work.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Kallenbach.
The sound piece presented here, L’entresol (The Mezza- nine), is a metaphor of the artist’s relation to his home- land, Morocco, and to the land where he grew up, France, an imaginary passage between Marseille and Tangiers, two gateways to two cultures that are both close and far apart. The idea, says the artist, is to “confront these two sonic envi- ronments, one linked to French popular culture, the other to Islamic culture, in the same space-time.
L’entresol (The Mezzanine) is a soundscape, I would even say a mental landscape, emanating from my situation of having lived and grown up between two cultures, two educations, where elements of sound soothed and nourished me. To me, these two cities, these two lands are part of me, of my wandering, my inspirations, I cannot tell them apart.”
Younes Baba Ali
Born in 1986 in Oujda, Morocco. He lives and works in Brussels and Casablanca.
Younes Baba Ali makes art that is unconventional, intelligent and critical, mostly in public space or places uncommon to art practice. He is a sharp observer and raises pertinent questions aimed at society, the institution and above all, his audience. As a free thinker he holds a mirror up to society and confronts it with its ingrained habits and dysfunctions. Baba Ali’s work often assumes the form of the readymade, but underneath its facade of simplicity there is a complex exercise in balance at work. As an artist-alchemist he measures and mixes technology, objects, sound, video and photography with political, social and ecological issues. The resulting installations discreetly coerce the unsuspecting viewer into taking a stand. Baba Ali presents people dilemmas and taboos and challenges them to (re)act. In this way he makes them his accomplices in acts of artistic guerrilla that unite the establishment and the common man.
Courtesy: the artist.
Notes
Publications
Press
Another 7 days to discover Mounir Fatmi's Pavilion of Exile in Tangier, Tanger Experience, August 8th, 2017.
—
Stella, Berger, From exile I made glasses to see, Dyptik, n°35, Oct-Nov 2016, pp. 36-38.
About
Studio Fatmi Paris
Téléphone & Fax: +33 (0)9 52 78 14 92
mounir fatmi
[email protected]
Assistante projets
Laura Pandolfo
[email protected]
Website Design
Untitled Duo
Project
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
Artists
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
André Mérian
Anita Pouchard-Serra
Beatriz Canfield
Eduardo Kac
Fabien Zocco
Gérard Fromanger
Guy Limone
Isabelle Arvers
Jean-Baptiste Audat
Laurent Malone
mounir fatmi
ORLAN
PEROU
Philippe Cazal
Sophie Bachelier
UNTEL
Yara Saïd
Younes Baba Ali
Ali Assaf
Anna Raimondo
Brankica Zilovic
Curtis Santiago
Dimitri Fagbohoun
El Hadji Keita
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos
Farah Khelil
Gohar Dashti
Hank Willis Thomas
Jamila Lamrani
Kendell Geers
Marco Godinho
Mohamed El Baz
Mona Hatoum
mounir fatmi
Ndari Lo
Omar Victor Diop
Philippe Cazal
Sadek Rahim
Sophie Bachelier
UNTEL
Yara Said
Younes Baba Ali
Contact
StudioFatmi Paris
Téléphone & Fax: +33 (0)9 52 78 14 92
mounir fatmi
[email protected]
Assistante projets
Laura Pandolfo [email protected]
Conception
Untitled Duo
REFUGEES ARE WELCOME
Yara Said.Flag,nylon.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Kallenbach.
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.
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
Julia Kristeva, a French-Bulgar- ian philosopher, writes: “...as the human being is a speaking being, it naturally speaks the language of its kin: the moth- er tongue, the language of its group, the national language. Changing languages amounts to losing this naturalness, be- traying it, or at least translat- ing it. A foreigner is essentially a translator. He can succeed in adapting perfectly to the des- tination language without for- getting the original language, or only partially forgetting it. However, most of the time he is perceived as a foreigner pre- cisely because his translation betrays a musicality or a men- tality that doesn’t quite adjust with the identity of the host population...”
Having lived a nomadic life, traveling, living and working around the world, Anna Rai- mondo reflects upon her rela- tions to the different languag- es in her life: Italian, Spanish, French and English. She is also taking a phonetics class to learn to speak with a British accent. Somewhere between ridicule and seriousness, hes- itation and encouragement, Anna’s exploration invites the audience into a “sonic soup” of lingue / idiomas / langues / languages.
Anna Raimondo
Born in 1981 in Italy. She lives in Brussels and works internationally.
Anna Raimondo completed the MA Sound Arts at the London College of Communication and is running a practice based PHD be- tween Arba and ULB University in Brussels on urban geography and gender perspectives. Anna Raimondo’s work is a medium for encounters and exchanges. It can be defined as a journey that il- lustrates social diversity while creating possible areas of interaction. The method is flexible and variable, accepting the accidental as the unforeseeable. Anna Raimondo does not seek to summarize a global reality, but rather to allow herself to be surprised and led by the Other. There is also a humorous and playful aspect, both in the actions in public spaces and in her plastic creations. A story, a word, a gesture or an everyday object become evidence of a multiple and evolving identity, both revealed and questioned.
Courtesy: the artist.
Brankica Zilovic has been cre- ating cloth cartographies for several years, stemming from a reflection on Pangaea: at the end of the Carboniferous era, over 300 million years ago, the Earth’s entire landmass formed one single supercontinent. Over the course of the follow- ing millions of years, Pangaea fractured, rifts formed and the surface of the land separated into continents. At the end of history, science predicts, in about 250 million years, an ultimate Pangaea will come to be, and all the continents will be united once again.
Through globalization, both economically and in terms of communication and informa- tion networks, we are in a way already experiencing Pangaea. But paradoxically, this doesn’t lead to a pacific unification of the world, far from it. Instead, it creates the exacerbation of oppositions, ruptures and ide- ological, religious and econom- ic rifts. Continents are more than ever adrift, simultaneous- ly moving and torn by intestine wars. Brankica Zilovic delivers a certain vision of the world, both poetic and violent, where she highlights this world’s ten- sions, dislocations and at times brutal sutures, with its arbi- trary borders, extorted peace agreements, dispossessed ter- ritories... Globalization only creates a “super fragile” su- percontinent constantly at risk of disintegration and liquefac- tion. A world adrift.
Brankica Zilovic
Born in Serbia. She lives and works in Paris.
Brankica Zilovic, visual artist graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris and teacher, is developing a work for which the thread appears repeatedly. Embroidery and the world of textiles have gradually become associated with his practices through installations, pictorial configurations or drawings. Particularly attentive to a biography that is both individual and collective, while remaining marked in particular by the context and the history of Serbia, she carries out memorial acts in which the relationship to accumulation, repetition and abnegation allow her to let rhizomatic configurations emerge. These sport an almost neuronal complexity that ultimately reflects the world of today.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Laure Roynette, Paris.
These three miniature pieces by Curtis Santiago are “diora- mas”, in other words, scenes represented in a three dimen- sional space. Dioramas were very popular in France in the 19th century. Their use was widespread, often for peda- gogical purposes, in natural history museums for example, but they can also be used for artistic purposes.
Curtis Santiago’s dioramas present miniature scenes in which he evokes contemporary problems encountered in his daily life: racism, police vio- lence, migration and his Carib- bean origins.
But these miniature dioramas, encased in their precious lit- tle boxes, are also portable works of art. When closed, they fit into a pocket and can go anywhere with their owner. This can be a way of keeping on oneself something special and beloved. Portable minia- ture art isn’t something new – Marcel Duchamp’s Box in a Suitcase comes to mind – but today it seems more relevant than ever, “the best means for a vagabond or an exile to pos- sess things”, in a world where nomadism can also become a way of life.
Curtis Santiago
Born in 1979 in Toronto. He lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.
Curtis Santiago is a former apprentice of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun. Santiago has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows including at the Studio Museum, Harlem; Rachel Uffner, Hunter College, New York; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, USA; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Cooper Cole, Toronto; the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, Canada. Following his artist-in-residency at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, USA, he participated in a residency with Gallery MOMO, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa, Africa. In 2018, the artist was included in the SITE Santa Fe SITELines.2018 Biennial in Santa Fe and in the Biennale de Dakar in Dakar, Senegal. He is currently featured in the Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto, Canada. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, USA. Santiago lives and works in Lisbon, Portugal.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Analix Forever.
In this Exile Pavilion, this state- less pavilion, the flag, as a symbolic element of identity and belonging, is evoked by several artists from different perspectives.
Here, Dimitri Fagbohoun’s African European Flag superimposes significations, open to the great complexity that a symbol of syncretic cul- tural and identity can take on.
At first glance, it resembles the American flag, with its two-colored stripes and stars.
But its chromatic twisting is reminiscent of the one per- formed by Afro-American artist David Hammons, who created the “African American Flag” in 1990, an American flag whose colors are switched to those of Panafricanism (black, red and green). Here, it isn’t the relation between African and America that is in question, but the post-colonial relation between Europe and Africa – the two continents the artist belongs to – reduced to the basic colors that are black and white.
On the AEF, the stripes, made of reflective fabric, are held together with zippers.
Where- as on the American flag, the stripes are sewn together (instead of being printed) in order to symbolize the construction of a durable union, here the zippers seem to ex- press the fragility of any union, whether it be European-African or Panafrican. A powerful visual object, this flag can be perceived as a way of materi- alizing “globalness”.
Dimitri Fagbohoun
Born in 1972, in Cotonou, Benin. He lives and works between Paris, Brussels and Cotonou.
Having grown up in Cameroon before settling in France where he now lives and works, the themes and questions he addresses are a reflection of his background and history, straddling geographical and artistic boundaries. His work is thus inseparable from his own experience, his plural identity.
Heterogeneous by the forms it uses, video, photography, installation, it expresses a relation to the identities and the history in which its writing disturbs the models that constitute them. In his practice, he questions themes as identity, memory, religion and politics.
His work has been shown internationally (London, Moscow, Berlin, Montréal, Sao Paolo, Dallas, Cuba, among the others), and exhibited in Africa (among others) as part of the African Photography encounters in Bamako (Mali) in 2007 and 2011, the Pan-African Festival in Algiers in 2009 and the Picha Biennale in Congo in 2010 and at the DAKART biennial OFF 2012 and 2016.
In 2014-2015, he participated in Simon Njami's Divine Comedy Project which opened in March at the MMK, Museum für moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, (Germany), he was shown also at the SCAD Museum in Savannah, Georgia (USA) and at the Smithsonian National Museum Of African Art in Washington DC, (USA).
In 2015, he participated (among others) in the exhibition A l'ombre d'Eros at the Royal Monastery of Brou, Bourg-en-Bresse, France and at Infecting the City, public arts festival, Cape Town.
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine, Milan.
As soon as they enter the exhibit, visitors are faced with this very large sculpture by El Hadji Keita, a sculptor from Saint-Louis, Senegal: an impressive representation made of wood, clay and iron that immediately connects the purpose of the Exile Pavilion with the intimate and collective history of Saint-Louis.
Many of El Hadji Keita’s works are inspired by nature and wild animals, sculpted from tradi- tional materials and representing his profound attachment to his roots and to the earth, but here, his art is at the service of a reappropriation of his personal history as well as that of his city and country.
El Hadji Keita
Courtesy: the artist.
Dilemma is a conceptual and linguistic piece that explores the concepts of home, identity and memory through the prism of exile. The light strip end- lessly repeats its message, like a psalmody, a prayer, an ap- peal or a siren’s call: “Welcome home”, “Come home”.
What does it mean to be “at home”? Whether it was his choice or whether he was forced to leave “his” land, doesn’t the migrant create a form of transitional space, half real, half fantasized – his ‘interi- or land’? The land of nostalgia, subject to the constant pull of the “proximity of the distant”, in which the “lost country is the furthest of the close and the closest of the distant” and where nostalgia can be defined as the ailment of putting roots down and tearing them out. There is also the nostalgia of exile, of a world without roots but “that never closes, full of different ‘similar people’, like me but not like me.”
And how do you know you’re home, how do you recognize “your island”, are you real- ly ever “home” anywhere? Conversely, doesn’t having a “home” amount to consider- ing the rest of the world as foreign? To be attached to a place, to belong to it, like an element within a given envi- ronment and group, isn’t that to make oneself a foreigner to everyone else, and be not just “me” but “the one who lives here”?
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos
Born in Greece, raised in Paris, she lives and works between Cairo, Paris and New York.
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist working around language and identity. Her work investigates the definition and construction of identities, personal memories, culture and collective histories. Her work was exhibited in galleries and institutions internationally including Times Art Museum (Beijing, China), La Panacée (Montpellier, France), Gallerie delle Prigioni - Luciano Benetton Collections (Treviso, Italy), Somerset House (London, UK), Musée Zadkine (Paris, France), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark), Künstlerhaus Wien (Vienna, Austria), Kunsthal Aarhus (Aarhus, Denmark), Palazzo delle Arti Napoli (Naples, Italy), AMA | Art Museum of the Americas (DC, USA), French Institute of Athens (Athens, Greece), CICA Museum (Gimpo-si, Korea) among others. Upcoming exhibitions include the Powerlong Museum (Shanghai, China) and the 5th Istanbul Biennale (Istanbul, Turkey). Kosmatopoulos also worked alongside socially charged entities such as the Organization of American States (Washington DC, United States), the Kayani foundation (Beirut, Lebanon), Unicef Blue Dot (Athens, Greece), One Happy Family (Lesbos, Greece) and the Museum Louis Braille (France) to create large-scale installations that raise awareness on social issues.
Courtesy: the artist .
Point de vue, point d’écoute (Clichés 2) is a series of post- cards sent from Tunisia be- tween the 1970s and 1990s, carefully incised, with only the written and stamped side ex- hibited.
By placing the cards this way, the picturesque photo invisi- ble, the artist transforms this common object, though it’s almost obsolete today, into a surface that is both critical and poetic. The handwritten texts can evoke something emotion- al, the memory of a place, a holiday, while the cut out con- tours of what is represented but not seen can only be im- agined, like a partial vision of reality.
This then becomes a gesture denouncing what the artist calls “the imposture of the tourist”: “The imposture of the tourist interests me greatly, as the partial and absent-minded observation of reality. That’s why I focused on objects cre- ated for tourists, like the post- card (...), through which I try to recreate this imposture with gestures of subtraction, cover- ing-up and indexation.”
Farah Khelil
Born in 1980, in Carthage. She lives and works between Tunis and Paris.
Farah Khelil concentrates her aesthetic research on the delicate equilibrium between writing, reading and imagination, transferring the attention onto the viewer's perspective. Images and words alternate and hide each other, creating new and authentic representations of the reality, far from the clichés that sometimes define contemporary culture. In 2007 she graduated at the Institut des Beaux-Arts in Tunis and in 2014 specialised with a PhD in Art and Science at the Sorbonne in Paris. Since 2010, she has taught at the Visual Art Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I. Among her recent exhibitions are Medi Terraneum at the Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palma de Mallorca (2015), Un cabinet de curiosités at the Undercurrent Projects in New York (2014), Mapp'ing E-Fest at the Palais Abdellia Tunis, Restitution at the Art Centre in Port-de-Bouc Martigues in France (2014) and the collective Perception de la Ciutat at the Civic Centre Fort Pienc in Barcelona (2006).
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine, Milan.
The photographs from the Stateless series show scenes of departure and exile fluctuating between the absurd and the dramatic, which instantly cre- ate a compassionate relation to their protagonists.
There is a particular atmos- phere in these images, ema- nating from the encounter of the situation exhibited and the context in which it takes place, written like an “enigmatic tale” with roots in the artist’ own experience. Indeed, they contain a very autobiograph- ical element: the artist grew up during the Iran-Iraq war, and his family was forced to move from Southern Iran to the North, a forced departure and a childhood in times of war that an entire generation, that of Gohar Dashti, can never for- get.
This series, of which two pho- tographs are presented here, was created in Qeshm, an Ira- nian island in the Persian Gulf that possesses a particularly impressive landscape of rocks and canyons, a landscape that reinforces the work’s symbolic and dramaturgical character, highlighting the way the body of the refugee is projected in the midst of an arid and exog- enous environment.
Gohar Dashti
Born 1980 in Ahvaz, Iran. She lives and works in Tehran.
Gohar Dashti received her M.A. in photography from the Art University of Tehran in 2005. For the past 15 years she has been making large scale photography with a particular focus on social issues. Her work references history and contemporary culture, as well as the convergence of anthropological and sociological perspectives; employing a unique, quasi-theatrical aesthetic, she brings to bear a diverse intellectual and cultural experience to illuminate and elaborate upon her perception of the world around her. In her most recent works, Dashti has explored, through her highly stylized, densely poetic observations of human and plant-life, the innate kinship between the natural world and human migrations.
Fascinated with human-geographical narratives and their interconnection to her own personal experiences, Gohar Dashti believes that nature is what connects her to the multiple meanings of ‘home’ and ‘displacement’, both as conceptual abstractions, and as concrete realities that delineate and contour our existence. The result is a series of quirky landscapes and portraits, as lush as they are arch, inciting questions about the immense, variegated, border-eschewing reach of nature – immune to cultural and political divisions – and the ways in which immigrants inevitably search out and reconstruct familiar topographies in a new, ostensibly foreign land.
Courtesy: the artist and Officine dell’Immagine.
Question Bridge: Black Males is an innovative transmedia art project that aims to create a platform to represent and re- define black male identity.
His work builds dialogues around stereotypical images of African Americans that the media seek to exploit in adver- tising, film and television.
Thomas and his collaborators traveled across the United States, recording questions from nearly 160 men, bring- ing the questions to others to answer, and filming additional questions from those respond- ents that other participants, in turn, could later address. The project enables a large group of men to speak to each other across geographic, economic, political, and generational di- visions.
The single-channel projection creates the sensation of a vir- tual conversation, with partic- ipants speaking across time and distance, and from their own lived experience. Their voices are key: being heard, not just seen, reaffirms each man’s subjectivity and coun- teracts dangerous generaliza- tions about group identity. In Thomas’s human-centered art, the elementary call to hear and see one another—to recognize each other as unique yet inter- dependent human beings—is undeniably necessary to over- come racism.
Hank Willis Thomas
Born in 1976, Plainfield, NJ. He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain; Musée du quai Branly, Paris; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Netherlands. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform.
Courtesy: the artist, Chris Johnson, Bayete Ross, Kamal Sinclair.
The work presented here is part of a group of installations entitled “Draw me an Exile”. Exile, exile or rather Exile exit is a simple and poetic piece, just a few words embroidered onto cotton sheets. The white sheet has multiple significa- tions that complete and some- times oppose each other. It can be an evocation of domesticity, a house, one’s bed, a protec- tive “home”.
Sleep, says the artist, the fact of locking oneself in a room, is an act of exile, the fact of fall- ing asleep is an act of exile, a form of interior exile. But the artist also tells us that this is an item for traveling, of anon- ymous bedding, hotel rooms... The sheet and the blanket are the first things that are given to a refugee, “a shield against the nudity into which an impos- sible life has forced him”, she writes.
These sheets can also be the ones in which lifeless bodies are placed, shrouds – “sheets for the ultimate rest” – for those who didn’t get to the end of the journey, exit. A shroud that, in Islamic tradi- tion, is made of three white sheets, like here.
Jamila Lamrani
Born in 1972 in Al Hoceima. She lives and works in Rabat.
Jamila Lamarani graduated from The Fine Arts School of Tétouan, in 1998 and is one the founding members of Collectif212. The artist likes to vary techniques that support her work but space remains her favored tool. She constructs it with from a fragile architecture made from dark fabrics evocative of the secret recesses of memory, she builds infinite layers of shadow and light that are just as fissured with openings to the dream world. In her recent installations, drawers are used, enclosing the memories of hope filled bygone lives. The distance imposed by her installations, with a mazes of stretched string that resemble bars and suggest both a chosen and subjected imprisonment of the individual within a society traversed by ambiguities and tensions. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Morocco and abroad, including the Dakar Biennial of Contemporary Art, in Senegal in 2002. In November 2008, during the exhibition Casa Arab de Madrid, Collectif212 Arte contemporaneo en Marrueccos, she installed Mémoire 1, with 6 other members of the Collectif212. In 2010, she created the second part of the installation, Mémoire 2, in the art space Le Cube Independent Art Room in Rabat, and installed, the same year, Fabric of memory, at the SANAA Gallery in Utrecht, Netherlands. In 2013, she participated in the project Au-délà de mes rêves, at the Royal Monastery of Brou and at H2M, in Bourg-en-Bresse, in collaboration with the Lyon Biennial. In 2014, she took part in the exhibition Identities, at the Institute of Islamic Cultures, in Paris. At present her work can be seen at the Photography and Visual Arts Museum, in an exhibition entitled Trace of the future.
Courtesy: the artist.
This piece by Kendell Geers comprises two identical clocks against a black background painted directly onto the wall. One is set on New York time, the other on Bagdad time. This installation seems to implicitly echo another piece by another artist, also named “Untitled” (“Perfect Lovers”), created in 1991 by Cuban-American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
This work presented itself as two identical and perfectly synchronized clocks symbol- izing love, and more broadly union and concordance, as well as the universality of time. But Kendell Geers replaced the subtitle “Perfect Lovers” with “Imperfect” and his clocks show two different times, that of a likely peaceful New York and a Bagdad afflicted by war (the piece was created in 1991, at the end of the Gulf War).
By highlighting the time differ- ence between the two coun- tries, he underlines their dis- cordance, de-synchronizes the times and refutes a globalized vision of the world: the world is not the same for everyone and it is difficult to reunite dis- jointed times.
Kendell Geers
Born in South Africa. He lives and works in Brussels.
At the 1993 Venice Biennale he officially changed his date of birth to May 1968, a momentous year in world history for human liberation and equality. Geers creates work that aims to disrupt commonly accepted moral codes and principles. Employing a wide range of references - from the realms of history of art, pornography, iconography and kitsch - Geers questions artistic value and mocks the notion of originality. His work reveals razor-sharp humour that plays with the viewer's repulsion and ridicules racial or religious stereotypes. Laden with complex and deep political implications, it is challenging and confrontational. At the same time, Geers' minimalist aesthetics generate a subtle poetic undertone. His use of language, ready-mades, neon, glass, icons, film, chevron tape and other objects confront the viewer head on. They often startle the eye and require a degree of interrogation from the spectator. ‘Love, By Any Means Necessary', the sixth solo exhibition for the artist at Stephen Friedman Gallery, opened in February 2020. Geers curated ‘IncarNations: African Art as Philosophy' in 2019 with Congolese collector Sindika Dokolo at Palais des Beaux-Arts (BOZAR), Brussels. A major retrospective of his work curated by Okwui Enwezor was held at Haus der Kunst, Munich in 2013. He participated in Documenta 14 in 2017 and Documenta 11 in 2002 in Kassel, Germany. Geers' work was included in the Venice Biennale in 2019, 2007 and 1993.
Courtesy: the artist and ADN Galeria.
This work, specially created on site by the artist for the exhib- it, spreads out like a moving swarm running on the walls of the gallery. From a distance, it looks like a cloudy sky, but by getting closer, one discovers that these shapes are made up of thousands of stamp marks resembling administrative stamps, only here they bear the text Forever immigrant.
These two words pose several questions: the belonging to a territory, the “uncertain per- manence” of a migrant’s situa- tion, exile and identity, as well as that of the fluidity of a world in which nomadism and cultur- al porosity can become a way of life.
“I have been conducting for some years now a sensitive ex- ploration of the questions of exile, immigration and geogra- phy. This reflection is nourished by my experience of a nomadic life, split between several lan- guages, impacted by continu- ous displacements and various cultural and social influences, traversed by the presence of literature, philosophy and po- etry”, explains the artist.
Forever Immigrant is itself a nomadic work of art that the artist produces wherever he is, with simple tools – a stamp and ink – and a minimal and repeat- ed gesture.
Marco Godinho
Born in 1978 in Salvaterra de Magos in Portugal. He lives and works between Paris and Luxembourg.
In a conceptualist spirit, he is interested in subjective perception of time and space through exploration of the notions of wandering, exile, experience, memory and time as it is lived. From 2000 to 2005, he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Nancy (France), at the École Cantonale d’Arts de Lausanne (Switzerland) and at the Kunstakademie and Fachhochschule Düsseldorf (Germany). Between 2005 and 2006, he completed a post-graduate at the Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy. Since 2006, he has had several solo exhibitions, including at the Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain (January–April 2013), at Faux Mouvement – Centre d’art contemporain in France (March–May 2013), Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg in Germany (July–September 2012), at l’Espace pour l’art in Arles, France (2012), at Mois de la Photo in Montréal, Canada (2011), at l’Instituto de Camões in Luxembourg (2008, 2011), at Centre d’arts plastiques et visuels in Lille, France (2009), at La Chaudronnerie – FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims (2007), and the Hervé Bize Gallery in Nancy, which represents him (2007, 2009, 2012).
Courtesy: the artist and 49 Nord 6 Est Frac Lorraine.
French Song and Hymns are two musical sound pieces that both question, using recogniz- able tunes, the concepts of be- longing and appropriation.
The first comprises excerpts from popular French songs sung a cappella by a woman’s voice. For a French person, these songs project the listen- er into an entire space-time made of memories, to a cer- tain period in time, a form of cultural identity; but do they mean anything to a foreigner? Must one understand, or at least be familiar with, Bourvil’s “Le Bal Perdu”, Edith Piaf’s “La vie en Rose”, Alain Souchon or France Gall in order to feel French or to grasp what the French spirit is all about?
In Hymns, several national an- thems are played on the guitar, which the viewer can attempt to identify. The anthem, the sonic equivalent to the flag, is an allegory crystallizing the symbolic representation of a nation and national identity. Consolidating the community spirit within the country, fos- tering a feeling of cohesion and belonging while reinforc- ing its image in terms of iden- tity in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Must we forget the anthem of the country we leave and learn the one of the country in which we settle? Is knowing and rec- ognizing this air a sign of one’s desire to integrate?
Mohamed El Baz
Born in 1967 in El Ksiba, Morocco.
Mohamed El baz graduated from the l'Ecole Régionale d'Art (Regional School of Fine Art) Dunkirk in 1989. In 1992, he obtained a DNSEP (Diplôme National Supérieur d’Expression Plastique, .diploma in visual arts) from the ENSA ( École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris Cergy) in Cergy. He also took classes at IHEAP in Paris (Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques (1988-1994), founded in 1985 by Pontus Hulten with Daniel Buren and Sarkis. Mohamed El baz lives and works in Casablanca , Morocco and Lille, France. Since 1993, Mohamed El baz has been creating a work entitled "Bricoler l’incurable"( Mending the incurable). His leitmotiv provides him with an ongoing, never ending and always controversial installations; as components or "details" find a place and adapt to each new concept. His work has three orientations through which Mohamed El baz crosses boundaries and categories : daily , autobiographical and playful ; the work itself becomes mobile and turns into a different story. Mohamed El baz questions the notions of borders and territories and all that works to erect barriers between people.
Courtesy: the artist.
This video was filmed during a series of performances con- ducted by Mona Hatoum in 1985 in the streets of Brixton, a working class, predominantly black London suburb.
She is seen walking barefoot on the sidewalk, through Brixton’s market and arcades, for an hour. The laces of her Doc Mar- tens shoes, commonly used at the time by the police but also by skinheads and punks, are tied to her heels, hindering her progression, which is slow and difficult. By exposing as she does the fragility of her bare feet against the harshness of the street and the heavy boots she painstakingly drags behind her like a burden, she denounc- es the violence of social order (at the time, Brixton was sub- ject to violence and riots that were severely repressed), but perhaps also the difficulty and the pressure to submit to any form of “integration”, as well as questions of integration and uprooting.
In 1975, Mona Hatoum came to London for a brief stay but couldn’t go home because war had just broken out. This forced exile and the brutal separation from her family that had remained in Beirut will become the themes of her videos and other works, through which she will attempt to “reproduce”, or rather “re- construct” a past that seems to haunt her.
Mona Hatoum
Born in 1952 in Beirut. She lives in London.
Mona Hatoum’s poetic and political oeuvre is realised in a diverse and often unconventional range of media, including installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Hatoum first became widely known in the mid 1980s for a series of performance and video works that focused with great intensity on the body. In the 1990s her work moved increasingly towards large-scale installations and sculptures that aim to engage the viewer in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum has developed a language in which familiar, domestic everyday objects are often transformed into foreign, threatening and dangerous things. Even the human body is rendered unfamiliar in Corps étranger (1994), a video installation that displays an endoscopic journey through the interior landscape of her own body. Homebound (2000) is an assemblage of household furniture wired up with an audibly active electric current that combines a sense of threat with a surrealist sense of humour. In Hot Spot (2006) and Map (clear) (2015) Hatoum uses cartography to explore instability and precariousness in today’s political landscape.
Courtesy: the artist and White Cube, London.
The photographic series As a Black Man takes as its sub- ject the American author John Howard Griffin (1920 – 1980) and his 1961 book, Black Like Me. In the book, Griffin details his experiences as a white man who decided to darken his skin, shave his head, and travel for six weeks in the segregated American South in 1959.
The ten photographs in fatmi’s As a Black Man are bookended by “white” Griffin on the left and “black” Griffin on the right, while the eight photographs in between become increasing- ly white or black depending on one’s viewing position. As foreground and background collapse into the same flat and monochromatic surface of the photograph, these hard-to- read images raise questions about when and where race is—and is not—malleable.
In doing so through photogra- phy, As a Black Man broaches the ever-pressing matter of how visual representation, and photography in particu- lar, have long been used to delimit, circulate, and contest constructions of race, political representation, and belonging.
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.
In the exhibition space, the visitors are likely to run into the slender silhouettes of Ndari Lo’s two walkers.
The walking man is of course a figure that evokes departure, traveling, nomadism and ex- ile. He reveals both the deeply mobile nature of man and his capacity to literally and figura- tively “move forward”. These walkers also possess the fol- lowing meaning for the artist: a determined walk towards the future, a “long walk towards change”, he said. The walkers are therefore doubly symbolic: of this walk, sometimes forced by events or elements but that naturally pushes man towards discovering new places, and of man’s fierce commitment to progress.
The Exile Pavilion represented a unique occasion to honour this internationally renowned Senegalese artist who recently passed away.
Ndari Lo
Dakar, 1961 - Lyon, 2017.
Ndary Lo was an internationally renowned Senegalese sculptor, also considered one of the most active African artists in the creation of installations. He is known to most for the men who march: very high iron silhouettes, which rush towards the sky. And man, in fact, was the center of his research, as well as AIDS, slavery and the tragic fate of migrants. This volume, directed by Jacques Rouayroux and Sylvain Sankalé, is presented as a monograph of the artist who places his metal works in dialogue with his most ephemeral creations often contained in dusty notebooks, private correspondences, unpublished documents. The book responds to the last wishes of Ndary Lo who, shortly before his death, commissioned Jacques Rouayroux to bring to light all the richness of his work for too long inevitably hidden in his atelier. Only through this process would it be possible for Ndary Lo to grasp the depth of his creation and the thought from which the creative moment originated. Alongside the artist's works, contributions from art and work specialists of the Senegalese sculptor take place, in this way the reader has the opportunity to resonate with the intimate thought of Ndary Lo, deepen his intentions and follow his meanders of his creative process.
Courtesy: rights-holders of the artist.
Identity and discovery, on both collective and personal levels, are the main themes of the Diaspora project. Constituting a journey through time, this photographic series reveals and deepens a story rarely told about the role of Africans out- side Africa. Thus casting a new gaze upon a certain conception of history, he provides answers to his perpetual questioning, to his dialogue with himself about his identity, as an artist and as an individual.
For this initial chapter, he fo- cused on 15th to 19th century Europe. Inspired by the multi- tude of baroque artworks that were created during that time, Diop sees this era as the begin- ning of a period of intensive interactions (which didn’t exist before) between Africa and the rest of the world.
By taking inspiration from por- traits of African public figures that made their mark on Eu- ropean history, Diop opposes and compares his own life jour- ney and his legacy to theirs, while retracing the unique des- tinies of travellers and all those who find themselves in a for- eign environment. For the first time, he places himself in his art, simultaneously adopting the posture of the narrator and a character and forcing himself to confront his own doubts.
Omar Victor Diop
Born in 1980 in Dakar.
Since his early days, Omar Victor Diop developed an interest for Photography and Design, essentially as a means to capture the diversity of modern african societies and lifestyles. The quick success of his first conceptual project Fashion 2112, le Futur du Beau which was featured at the Pan African Exhibition of the African Biennale of Photography of 2011 in Bamako (Rencontres de Bamako) encouraged him to end his carrer in Corporate Communications to dedicate to photography in 2012. Omar Victor Lives in Dakar, his body of work includes Fine Arts and Fashion Photography as well as Advertising Photography. He enjoys mixing his photography with other forms of art, such as costume design, styling and creative writing. His work is interrogative and intriguing, prospective, yet a tad vintage and draws inspiration from Diop's international uplifting, as well as his african visual heritage.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Magnin-A.
On ne remarque pas l’absence d’un inconnu (“You don’t no- tice a stranger’s absence”): the sentence rings like a slogan and like a self-evident fact. Using the codes of mass com- munication, such as posters, a widely used communication tool, Philippe Cazal constructs a semantic body of work that is simple and powerful, poetic and political.
In the context of the Exile Pa- vilion, this manifesto resonates with an entire ethical reflection on the close and the distant, the value given to “the oth- er who has a face” or to “the other that I will never see”, as French philosopher Paul Ricoeur would say. Who is he and did he ever even exist, he who dies between borders or on a shore, and that I have never known nor even looked in the eye?
In the same spirit of urban in- terventions, Je veux une suite et pas une fin (“I want a con- tinuation and not an end”), which can be interpreted as a refugee’s cry of hope, is paint- ed with a stencil on the outside wall of the gallery.
Philippe Cazal
Born in 1948 in La Redorte. He lives and works in France.
Philippe Cazal is a French artist whose practice of misusing the codes of the world of advertising and marketing produces a critical discourse on the city, politics, economy and society but also on the place that occupies today the artist.
His work has been exhibited many times, including the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Par- is, the Barbican Center in London, the FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon but also the Villa Park in Annemasse. After studying at the National School of Decorative Arts in Paris, he created with Jean-Paul Albi- net and Alain Snyers in 1975 (joined in 1978 by Wilfrid Rouff) group UNTEL. This group of artists proposes to examine our daily life and its banality as well as public space in a series of actions and interven- tions, often performed in the street, inviting the public to rethink the world. At the Biennale de Paris in 1977, they invest the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris with Daily Life, a department store type environment where more than two thousand objects of every- day life are presented under vacuum. By targeting consumerism, this fake self-service questions the habit.
Courtesy: the artist.
A piece especially created for the exhibit, Skin (Through my eyes) was initially born from what the proximity of the river inspires, from these port- hole-shaped windows evocative of a boat, related to the part played by Saint-Louis and the Senegal River in the history of slavery. By covering the portholes with a photograph against the light, Sadek Ra- him superimposes landscapes and stories. These views of the bay of Algiers strangely resemble the ones that can be seen through these open- ings. The artist remarks that what we see of Algiers here is probably what the slaves also saw, of which some came from Saint-Louis, sent to one of the largest slave camps of Algeria’s Ottoman era.
At the same time, the artist materializes these words by Achille Mbembe, a Cameroo- nian theoretician of post-colo- nialism, regarding the terrible situation of exiles in the Med- iterranean basin: “The Med- iterranean sea has become like the Atlantic in the 15th century. The Atlantic was a graveyard for countless slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas. The estimated number of slaves who died in the Atlantic is in the millions. A thinker such as Glissant con- structed his entire reflection around this idea of the black Atlantic, as Paul Gilroy and the others would say... So today, it’s the Mediterranean. I think we can speak of a black Mediterranean.”
Sadek Rahim
Born in Oran, Algeria.
Sadek Rahim holds a Visual Arts MA and a AS from the Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in London and a BA from The Lebanese Fine Arts Academy in Beirut. He returned from UK to Algeria in 2004. He is also the co-founder of The Mediterranean Contemporary Art Biennale of Oran in 2011 and The Contemporary Drawing Salon in Oran 2012, in collaboration with the local organization Civ-oeil. Concerning his engagement with cultural politics, the artist has expressed his commitment to the contemporary art in Algeria and promoted an awareness of contemporary Algerian art and culture internationally. He also curated and co-curated events like Nuit Blanche Oran and Video’Appart-Oran with the French Institute and AHLAN WAHRAN with METROPOLART Cities & Artists Paris. The work of Sadek Rahim often combines photography and installation, technology and design. He has shown his work widely following his thesis project at Central Saint Martin's in London.
Courtesy: the artist.
Created in 2017 for the perfor- mance-exhibit “The Absence of Paths” for the Tunisian pa- vilion of the 57th Venice Bien- nale that addressed the status of the migrant in the world, Rejected is a series of twelve one-minute video portraits filmed at the camp of Choucha in Southern Tunisia. This camp, located near the Libyan bor- der, was opened in 2011 dur- ing the Libyan war and accom- modated up to 18,000 people, among which many refugees, or “third party nationals”, who had immigrated to Libya but couldn’t go back there nor to their country of origin, and therefore had nowhere to go.
Shut down in 2013 by the UN High Commissioner for Ref- ugees, the camp of Choucha continued to exist nonethe- less, as a few dozen people stayed on the site, demanding the revision of their rejected asylum applications. In June 2017, they were removed by the local authorities.
These twelve portraits filmed in 2013, shortly before the dis- mantling of the camp, almost motionless and silent, put us simply and powerfully face to face with these men, women and children fighting for sur- vival, waiting, in this sort of heterotopia, this place outside of common reality that is a ref- ugee camp.
Sophie Bachelier
Sophie Bachelier is a photographer and filmmaker, a graduate in Decorative Arts from Paris who also holds a Master’s degree in Eth- nology. She is interested in how the collective history meshes with in- dividual destinies and transforms them. Her work focuses on themes of memory, wandering, exile and their traces; it privileges the actual words, and the silences, of the people she meets over commentary. Her film “MBËKK Mi, the breath of the ocean” about illegal emigra- tion in Senegal as seen by those wives and mothers who remain on the shore, received special mention for Best Feature-length Docu- mentary from the Anna Politkovskaya Jury at the 30th Créteil Wom- en’s Film Festival. Her film “CHOUCHA, an unfathomable indiffer- ence” received the prize for best.
Courtesy: the artist.
Untel
UNTEL is a group of artists originally formed by Jean-Paul Albinet, Philippe Cazal and Alain Snyers (Wilfrid Rouff takes the place of Alain Snyers following the departure of the latter in 1978) whose existence is brief but passionate, from 1975 to 1980, gave life to many actions in the public space.
The common denominator of these actions is the investigation of the everyday, social and political investigation, for critical purposes, very imbued with the protest ideas of May 1968 and the situationist thinking.
The group carries out a critical analysis of the society in its contradictions and proceeds to a permanent implementation of all the means at its disposal, by seizing the materials that exist in the everyday life and by carrying out interventions in the urban space.
Courtesy:Mfc Michèle Didier and private collection.
The Refugee Nation is an in- dependent solidarity organiza- tion for refugees from around the world that was originally created to implement and support a team for the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. They needed a flag: Yara Saïd, a young Syrian artist living as a refugee in Amsterdam, im- agined this one.
“The black and the orange are a symbol of solidarity with all the courageous souls who had to wear life vests in order to cross the sea and seek safety in a new country. I wore one. I have a personal connection with these vests that bear those two colours”, explains Yara Saïd.
The flag, and an anthem: these are the first two official crea- tions of the Refugee Nation, two symbols of union for a sin- gle cause or common values, two symbols of identity whose traces can be found in other artworks present in the exhib- it. This flag, in all its simplicity and visual efficiency, has be- come a very powerful symbol and was recognized as one of the world’s best design crea- tions in 2016.
Yara Said
Born in 1991 in Sweida, Syria. She lives and works in Amsterdam.
Yara Said graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University, in 2014. During and after her studies she worked as an art teacher for children. The artist has participated in several workshops and exhibitions with renowned artists, such as Edward Shahda and Nizar Sabour.
She likes to clarify how time affects people and the surrounding materials, either this material is a painting, a sculpture, the progress of a video art or a human being. Keeping in mind the relationship of forms within space, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, this broad concept is still the main concern in her artistic research that she tries to reflect in her work.
Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Kallenbach.
Younes Baba Ali
Born in 1986 in Oujda, Morocco. He lives and works in Brussels and Casablanca.
Younes Baba Ali makes art that is unconventional, intelligent and critical, mostly in public space or places uncommon to art practice.
He is a sharp observer and raises pertinent questions aimed at society, the institution and above all, his audience.
As a free thinker he holds a mirror up to society and confronts it with its ingrained habits and dysfunctions. Baba Ali’s work often assumes the form of the readymade, but underneath its facade of simplicity there is a complex exercise in balance at work.
As an artist-alchemist he measures and mixes technology, objects, sound, video and photography with political, social and ecological issues. The resulting installations discreetly coerce the unsuspecting viewer into taking a stand.
Baba Ali presents people dilemmas and taboos and challenges them to (re)act. In this way he makes them his accomplices in acts of artistic guerrilla that unite the establishment and the common man.
Courtesy: the artist.
Project
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