CLEMENTINE DELISS - RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA - ALENKA
PIRMAN
The Land
Initiated in 1999, ''The
Land'' (a more direct translation from Thai to Engligh would be "the rice
field") was the merging of ideas by different artists to cultivate a place
of and for social engagement.
The land is located in proximity to the
village of Hang Dong, a twenty minute drive from the center of the provincial
capital Chieng Mai. As some rice farmers are having dificult times in the area,
due to the levels of floods and high water level, rice farming has not been very
productive. Because of this, some rice fields in the area have been offered for
development, as the rice farmers are looking to find better areas for the fields.
Though initially the action to aquire the rice fields was initiated by two
artists from Thailand, the land was initiated with anonymity and without the concept
of ownership. The land was to be cultivated as an open space, though with certain
intentions towards community, towards discussions and towards experimentation
in other fields of thoughts.
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December 1, 2001 January 26, 2002
Script for "Dallas Southfork in Hermes Land", Slobozia, Romania.
The Southfork Ranch located in
Texas was picked after producers helicoptered over the area in search of the perfect
setting for the American television series Dallas. The series appeared on CBS
from 1978 to 1991 and continues to be syndicated all over the world.
'Dallas' was one of the few American Television series broadcast during the communist
regime of Nicolai Ceausecu. The dictator was a fan of the program, but broadcast
it to show the evils of capitalism. During the mid-1990s the corrupt Romanian
billionaire Ilie Alexandru created a Balkan version of the Southfork Ranch in
Slobozia, on the main road between Bucharest and the Black Sea.
'Southfork
Dallas in Hermes Land' is a cross between an amusement park and a resort based
on the Southfork ranch including a 132-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower,
vernacular gypsy pagodas and castles.
The Southfork Ranch in Slobozia
is a sort of do-it-yourself reconstruction, interpreted from videotapes of the
television series and books on the architecture of the American South.
The Galerie Chantal Crousel is proposing an unusual combination by inviting Cameron Jamie for the first time to exhibit with Fabrice Gygi who will show works on paper which have never yet been presented in France.
The linographies on paper and on fabric by Fabrice Gygi were made at a time when the artist was engaged in research about himself and about his art. The plates we are presenting, the result of ten years of work, are an expression of disappearance, of a strong search for identity and of a rebel attitude that is dominant in his work. "I feel that I'm retranscribing things I've observed around the world. I work a little bit like a figurative painter with a real concern for realism. I try to appropriate the object by making it by memory" he said while speaking of his sculptures. This quote could also apply to Cameron Jamie's work which is partly inspired by the mayhem of American suburbs. It is in this atmosphere that Jamie creates his weirdest images which remind us that hell is always close by and that reason is not always reliable. For the works on paper we are presenting, the artist has collaborated with a street portrait artist who he asked to make portraits of his face made up in white and of "evil" animals such as goats or bats. Calling on the demons of his childhood, Cameron Jamie then reappropriates the drawings by subjecting them to outrageous offenses : distorted or caricatured faces, human heads on animal bodies, entrails spilling out, in exulting compositions with pastel and gouache, collage and stream-of-consciousness writing.
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Photographs - Sculptures - Drawings
For his 6th personal exhibition at the Chantal Crousel Gallery, Wolfgang Laib presents 39 b/w photographs, in conjunction with a selection of sculptures and with a series of drawings made at this occasion. The subjects of the photographs : sanctuaries, stupas, tombs, walls, offerings - chosen among a wide range of forms and functions which have been recorded by the artist on his journeys - enrich the multi-layered lectures of his minimalist sculptures, articulated here around the theme of the mountain : a mountain of pollen - rice cones (Meals for the Planets) - rice houses.
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NIGHTSNOW
Under the generic
title NIGHTSNOW, Melik Ohanian articulates his first gallery exhibition with six
works and a full palette of media.
Switch Off , 2002
A simple action that modifes - the state of a street, of a building, of a
public space. That alters a moment and one's perception.
Switch Off consists
of a large light box, containing a b/w photography of the globe. On top of this
synthetic image - a recomposition by computer of the world at night, produced
by the NASA - a zillion of light dots reproduces the electric lighting used all
over the planet. By means of a button, the viewer can commute this vision of the
plane world into a constellation : 'The Sculptor's Studio' (one of the solar system's
most remote constellations).
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September
12 - October 30, 2002
Bas Jan Ader, Graham Gussin, Marine Hugonnier,
Hassan Khan, Anri Sala
Two years after GEOGRAPHIES (Darren Almond
- Graham Gussin - Anri Sala), the gallery persues the declination of place and
time experienced in a different manner, through GEOGRAPHIES #2, an exhibition
confronting significant works by Bas Jan Ader - Graham Gussin - Marine Hugonnier
- Hassan Khan - Anri Sala. In the present context, the relationship to geography
is characterized by an existential attitude, a psycho-geography. It is sustained
by the desire of giving up certainty, of getting lost - in quest of the sublime.
NOBUYOSHI
ARAKI
ED VAN DER ELSKEN
ALBERTO GARCIA-ALIX
HASSAN KHAN
ENRIQUE
METINIDES
An exhibition curated by Galerie Chantal Crousel at the Poste
du Louvre
BEING TOGETHER
Must quotidian always
be associated with humdrum?
Rather, it is perhaps the quotidian--the
everyday, the banal--that, in the long run, heroically insures the survival of
the individual and the group as a whole.
In this respect, it is worth
recalling the origin of the word "banal": in medieval France, a "banal"
baking day was one when the bread that came from the oven was not owed to the
lord of the manor. It was a day of common bread, a day of quiet celebration when
life was not owed to the powers-that-be.
It is precisely these innocuous
activities and daily little rituals that constitute the eternal bedrock of "being
together." We should remember that when nothing is important, everything
assumes importance.
The interlude represented by the "modern period"
is coming to a close. It has been a period of closure--of closed identities, shielded
by the walls of private life. A period of the individual as master and owner of
self and the world. Of the individual as a powerful yet solitary figure.
Michel Maffesoli
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Communiqué de presse / Press release
November 7, 2002 - January 11, 2003
Whereas the terracotta containers bear internal traces of gestures, Orozco's photographs of Malian landscapes testify to the presence, practices, and relations of the human body. In the Cemetery series, for example, bowls used to carry and store food and water are stranded on sandy tombs, set there as though accompanying the deceased into the open vastness of the desert. A different sense of infinity, meanwhile, is present in the photograph titled Total Perception, showing the mosque of Timbuktu in which light, earthen floor, mats, and rugs together construct a very simple space of concentration and meditation. Each of the sixteen photographs seems to say, "We have passed this way..." Erosion and the geometry of human activity are, together, inscribed on these Malian landscapes. At the crossroads of nature and culture, these paths converge in an image of reality and oneness.+ Infos
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