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Les Extatiques 2020 : Paris La Défense & La Seine Musicale

“A 3rd edition that’s still ecstatic, but has nothing to see… In 2014, Marina Abramovic said, “Art is a question of energy and energy is invisible”! It is this energy that is at the heart of this edition subtitled “Nothing to See” in the sense that the works presented are either improbable because they defy the senses, gravity, logic or codes of power – like the Concorde obelisk created by Ívan Argote especially for the exhibition – or conceal the visible hidden like the Zig Zag labyrinth by Hector Zamora which plays with shadows, the sun and the architecture of La Défense. Eclectic, joyful, colourful, this new edition invites you to stroll, to a surprising walk through the forms of the works and their hidden meaning that gradually reveals itself on contact with them”.

Fabrice Bousteau

The Heartbeat Museum, Christian Boltanski : Lanba, Wulong

The Heartbeat Museum

“The Heart represents in all cultures the seat of life and soul. Each heartbeat is a little different and reminds us of the human being it bore. Since 2008, I decided to create a world archive where thousands of hearts from all over the world would be stored.
In Wulong, I wanted to set up a permanent pavilion for recording and listening to Chinese hearts first and then to other visitors from all over the world. The heartbeats recorded in this way will be both kept in the pavilion and available for everyone to listen to. This place should become, over time, a place of pilgrimage where everyone will remember a loved one. These beats will outlive those who gave them and will remain as the memory of missing humans.”

Christian Boltanski

Sonsara, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot : Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum

Sonsara

Born in Nice in 1961, Céleste Bousier-Mougenot lives and works in Sète. His works have been widely exhibited and collected all over the world. After training for a musical career at the Conservatoire National de Nice, he worked as the composer of the stage director Pascal Rambert’s “Side One Posthume Théâtre” company for nearly ten years from the 1980s to the 1990s. Bousier-Mougenot started to create sound installation since 1994, was nominated for the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2010, and represented France at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. His exhibition Acquaalta in 2015 turned the space of Palais de Tokyo into a lake and invited the audience to feel all the changes in tactile, visual and auditory experience from this, winning him international recognition. Bousier-Mougenot’s other important exhibitions include San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), Copenhagen Contemporary (2017), Museum of Queensland, Brisbane (2016), Jupiter Artland (2016), Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal (2016), French Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2015), Centre Pompidou-Metz (2015), Biennale de Lyon (2017, 2015), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2012), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul (2011), the Barbican Centre in London (2010) and Le Maison Rouge in Paris (2010).

Les Extatiques 2019 : Paris La Défense

Extatiques, 2019

With Les Extatiques, Paris La Défense invites Fabrice Bousteau, artistic director of the exhibition, to imagine an extraordinary journey, born of the encounter and exchange between the territory and the artists. More than an exhibition, Les Extatiques is a true poetic journey. In 2019, the public is invited to discover “L’art au grand air”, air and wind being the theme of this edition. An invitation to breathe calmly or to change the air, where you can meet the works of Philippe Ramette, Pierre Ardouvin, Benedetto Bufalino and many others, through inflatable sculptures, photographs and installations.

Forme Publique 2019-2020 : Paris La Défense

FORMES PUBLIQUES 2019-2020

Since its creation in 2012, the Biennale Forme publique has been offering creators an innovative and experimental approach to designing street furniture adapted to the specificities of the La Défense business district. For its 4th edition on the theme of credits, it addresses the issue of sustainability. Three candidate teams composed of a designer and an industrialist were selected in a competitive dialogue to design and produce a series of prototypes, displayed and tested for one year on the Esplanade de la Défense. At the end of this period, the candidates will include the users’ feedback in their final offer and Paris La Défense will choose among them the winning range to equip its territory.

Exhibition from October 3, 2019 to fall 2020
With the furniture of Pierre Charrié + Rondino, Jean Couvreur + Buton Design, Robert Stadler + TF urban

Sponsor: Paris La Défense

Artistic director: Valérie Thomas and Jean-Chritophe Choblet for Nez Haut
Dialogue management: Open City
Production: Eva Albarran & Co (leader of the consortium)
Technical direction: Playtime
Graphic identity: H5

 

Infrawind & Metacloud, Evariste Richer : 1% artistique – Institut Mines Télécome (Palaiseau)

Infrawind & Metacloud
1% artistic – Institut Mines Télécom (Palaiseau)

Evariste Richer (Artwork)
Alexis Bertrand (Scenographer)

INFRAWIND & METACLOUD is a double language. “Poetic”, it sublimates the project of the architects of the Institut Mines-Télécom building in Palaiseau. “Meteorological”, he draws a map of welcome and orientation towards convivial spaces. INFRAWIND & METACLOUD’s weather map, inspired by the motifs of the cloud, the compass rose and the barbule, extends over the 55,000 m2 of the building. A range of “Barbules” furniture (tables, benches, stools) can be found in the convivial spaces. A series of enamelled plates, of different sizes, take place in the building: 6 monumental clouds in the atrium, 6 wind roses and 176 geodetic orientation plates.

 

Lifetime, Christian Boltanski : National museum of Art, Osaka

Lifetime

Christian Boltanski (b. 1944) is one of France’s preeminent contemporary artists. After first making short films in the late ’60s, Boltanski turned to photography in the 1970s. Based on his interest in the development of human history and cultural anthropology, Boltanski garnered attention for a large number of works in which he combined everyday objects such as biscuit tins with photographs and documents to create links to his own memories as well as those of others. In the ’80s, Boltanski began producing installations that utilized light, including the Monument series (1985-ongoing). These altar-like structures, made out of photographic portraits of children and light bulbs, dealt with religious themes. This led to works such as Altar to the Chases High School (1987), an altar consisting of face shots of Jewish students who enrolled in a Vienna high school in 1931 that were illuminated with light bulbs. As this technique of displaying a collection of portraits evokes images of genocide, specifically the mass murder of millions of Jewish people in Nazi Germany, it has prompted a great deal of controversy. For Boltanski, whose father was Jewish, the Holocaust is something with deeply personal significance. In works such as Personnes (2010), made up of countless articles of clothing piled up in the vast Grand Palais in Paris, Boltanski has used a variety of methods to address themes such as history, memory, death, and absence.

After being invited to participate in international exhibitions of contemporary art such as Documenta (Kassel, Germany) and the Venice Biennale in the ’70s, Boltanski’s field of activity expanded to include many countries all over the world. After his first Japanese solo exhibition at ICA, Nagoya and Art Tower Mito in 1990 and 1991, Boltanski actively showed his work in the country at events such as the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial and the Setouchi International Art Festival. In 2016, he held a solo exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum.

Encompassing everything from the artist’s earliest pieces to his most recent work, this exhibition, jointly organized by the National Museum of Art, Osaka, the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Nagasaki Prefectural Art Museum, is the first full-scale retrospective of Boltanski’s career to be presented in Japan. While looking back at a variety of Boltanski’s efforts from the ’70s to the present, the retrospective is based on the artist’s idea of creating an installation for a space – or he suggests, “presenting an exhibition as a single work of art.” The exhibition will serve as an introduction to Boltanski’s magnificent world of art, which he began making over 50 years ago and continues to create today.

Faire son Temps, Christian Boltanski : Centre Pompidou, Paris

Faire son Temps

In some fifty works punctuating the career of Christian Boltanski, this generous review of the work of one today’s greatest creative figures enables us to measure the scope and the ambition shaped by his personal history and a half-century of meditations on the role and discourse of the artist in today’s societies.

Thirty-five years have gone by since the first exhibition of Christian Boltanski in the Centre Pompidou. Thirty-five years that saw his work transformed in the course of the 1980s when the artist abandoned the taste for archives and inventories that had made him known as one of the major figures in memorial art, and began to develop a work in the form of lessons of darkness and a meditation on death through vast installations and exhibits.
“Life in the Making” seeks to trace this passage from “small forms” to “large forms”. Designed by Boltanski himself as a vast stroll through the heart of his work, the exhibition is meant less as a retrospective than as a series of sequences marking the stages and transformations in his discourse. The first rooms thus remind us of how Boltanski, the self-taught artist, designed his seminal pieces, based on a consideration of photography and all forms of crafting and recreating relating to the childhood and past of all human beings. We thus find the fragile installations that make up Théâtres d’ombres tinged with shades of wonder and an ever-faithful fondness for the performing arts. Vast environments with shaky lighting invite us to discover, in the shadows of rooms lit up by the works themselves, a reflection in the form of a meditation on disappearance in anonymity and on the most fleeting traces possible.
As an archaeologist of his own history and that of everybody else, Boltanski has transformed himself into a “mythologist” in the course of a half-century of creation. From the account of childhood to that of the tales and legends he discovers and reinvents today until the end of the world, Boltanski has sought to shuffle off the self in order to merge into the history of mankind. A vast project if ever there was one, which leads him ever further in search, not of lost time but of unknown lands rich in stories that are being lost in the mists of time.
Christian Boltanski no longer sets out on the only real and fictitious traces of his own life. He no longer describes himself, any more than he seeks to conduct an inventory or a portrait of a particular being. “To write,” Maurice Blanchot announced magnificently, “is to expose oneself to the risk of the absence of time which is ruled by an eternal starting over. It means changing from I to He, so that what happens to me happens to no one, is anonymous by virtue of the fact that it concerns me and is repeated in an eternal dispersion.”

In order to design this review combining all the forms and media that comprise his aesthetic and make the exhibition itself a work in its own right, Christian Boltanski wished to bring together some of the most emblematic pieces from his career: from the Vitrines de références to L’Album de la famille D, from Habits de François C to Reliquaires, from Théâtres d’ombres to Monuments, from Réserves to Tombeaux, from the Cœur battant of Teshima to the dead souls of Animitas, from Autels to the ghosts of Misterios, the exhibition presents a “reconfigured past” in which we can only dream in resonance with Arlette Farge’s beautiful text, conscious of the “fragile lives” that, in Le Goût de l’archive, published in 1989 announced: “We cannot bring back to life the lives that ended in archives. This is no reason to make them die a second time. There is limited space to elaborate a narrative that neither cancels them out nor dissolves them, that keeps them available until one day, somewhere else, their enigmatic presence is made into another narrative.”

Christian Boltanski’s work deals with this “space”. Here we realise that time, in all the shapes and forms it takes, is his partner. “Departure” and “Arrival”, like two signs in a train station or a weary fairground, call out visitors as they enter and leave the meanders of the exhibition, no doubt reminding us that art helps to enable the journey and to forget the destination. In this interval, we suggest that it is up to each visitor to know how to take and make “time in the making”.

Bernard Blistène, Director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou
Curator of the exhibition
In Code couleur n°35, september-december 2019, p. 20-23

Lifetime, Christian Boltanski : The National Art Center of Tokyo

Lifetime

This exhibition is among the largest retrospectives ever held in Japan of the work of Christian Boltanski, one of the most prominent contemporary artists, and encompasses work from throughout his career. After making short films in the late 1960s, Boltanski worked extensively with photography in the 1970s, gaining attention for works dealing with his own memories and those of others. In the 1980s, Boltanski began producing installations utilizing light and exploring religious themes, for which he earned international acclaim. Since then, he has continued producing and exhibiting works worldwide with the themes of history, memory, and the vestiges of human existence. While looking back at a variety of his efforts over the past 50 years, this retrospective was designed by Boltanski, who has described himself as “a spatial artist,” as an installation for this specific venue.