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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.

Un Eté au Havre, 2019

Un Été Au Havre – 29 June – 22 September 2019 – Le Havre

Under the artistic direction of Jean Blaise, great artists are invited to reinterpret Le Havre. Those who took part in the first edition of Un Été Au Havre have all, from their first steps on Le Havre soil, imagined producing works of very, very large format. Certainly to the city’s measure, at least up to what it has inspired them, the sensations it has awakened or provoked… In 2019, Un Été Au Havre returns in a stabilized format: Jean Blaise invites great artists to provoke architecture, to transform the city into a huge game board, to express their art in the public space. Ten new works and installations enrich the existing collection.

With Stephan Balkenhol, Antoine Dieu, Baptiste Leroux, Henrique Oliveira, Susan Philipsz, Erwin Wurm.

Organizers: GIP Un Été Au Havre
Artistic direction: Jean Blaise with the collaboration of Kitty Hartl
Production: Eva Albarran & Co Agency / Ateliers Puzzles

Nuit Blanche 2019

Under the artistic direction of Didier Fusillier and his artistic advisor Jean-Max Colard

A mobile, dancing, circulatory, walking, moving, carried away, sporting, festive night, mobilizing bodies, eyes and minds! For you, for all audiences, we have created a Nuit Blanche all in motion. Where the artists’ works paraded in the form of creative floats, surrounded by musical groups. Where the artists themselves wander in a singular and poetic way through the city. And without this general movement, we invite you too to actively participate in this 17th Nuit Blanche of another kind: either by a somewhat sporty ride through the capital’s prestigious cultural institutions, or by contributing to the symbolic transformation of the highway into a space and light velodrome!

Together, we propose to put in motion and question the ordinary separations between worlds and cultures: with the Parade, the field of contemporary art meets the popular traditions of celebration or carnival, while with the Velodrome, the Grande Traversée or with the artists who will invest the Ladoumègue sports centre, it is the 2024 Olympic Games that are on the horizon.

Finally, the movement is the desire to offer you a Nuit Blanche in line with the rhythm of the city, with its current challenges, with its diverse means of transport and its multiple mobilities.

Before we embark with you on this culturally eventful Nuit Blanche, we would like to thank the artists: visual artists, musicians, performers, voiding, they are the heart of our Night and have fully committed themselves to this extraordinary adventure, with the desire to participate in this great creative celebration that is Nuit Blanche. We would like to thank Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, and Christophe Girard, Deputy Mayor of Paris for Culture, for entrusting us with the artistic direction of this extraordinary Night in the Capital. A huge thank you also to the full mobilization of all the teams of the City of Paris, starting with the Cultural Affairs Department, as well as the Eva Albarran production agency. We would also like to express our sincere thanks to all the partners, public and private, institutional and business, who provided the financial and structural support needed to organise such an event.

AND NOW IT’S TIME FOR MOVEMENT AND A BEAUTIFUL ALL-NIGHTER FOR ALL OF US! 

 

L’Aube, David Teboul : panthéonisation de Simone Veil, Panthéon

L’Aube – Dawn
Trees for me, especially on the road of certain journeys, it was very cold and I remember these trees being caught in the ice, it was one of the rare moments when there was a feeling of beauty.

I was ten years old when I saw Simone Veil for the first time, on a Tuesday evening in a programme called Les Dossiers de l’écran devoted to deportation. I was allowed to watch the television because Wednesday was a day without school; the choice was King Kong or the last episode of the American series Holocaust.
I was struck by the bun of her hair, her beauty and the depth of her gaze. It was at the end of the 1970s. Years later, in 2003, when I was thirty years old, the memory of this emotion remained sharp and I decided to make a film to be able to meet her.
Her secretary’s response was final: “Mrs Simone Veil does not wish to participate in a film about herself.” I called back and laid out my arguments: “I don’t understand why Mrs Simone Veil does not wish to even meet me, does not give a chance to this desire to see and hear her.” Simone Veil grabbed the phone angrily: “You really want to see me? Be at my office tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. But I’m warning you, my answer is no and I will not entertain you more than ten minutes. And please be on time!”
The following day, I was there and she was late, for which I was glad. The ball was in my court; I was persuaded that she would accept. She looked at me, troubled. I kept quiet. Her: “What is it that interests you about me?” Me: “Your hair bun, Mam”. I felt that she was shaken.
She then told me that none of the women in her convoy were fully shaven, that she never knew why and that it saved her life. Without knowing, I had touched upon a crucial point of her deportation. This first story led to many others.
This immediately intimate encounter was the start of the film and the friendship that followed. Our hours of filming were made up of interviews as well as many moments of her daily life, particularly at her hairdresser’s on the question of her and survival. Our trip to Auschwitz was painful and upsetting for Simone. She had come back of course for commemorations, but she had never wanted to look at the Birkenau barracks again where she had lived for several months. It was inside these barracks that she told me about their daily life, the three of them, Simone, Yvonne, her mother, and her sister Madeleine.
I had promised Simone Veil that I would one day come back to these interviews. I am able to keep this promise today, with the audio installation that I am proposing for her entrance in the Panthéon.
I wanted Simone Veil to be accompanied by her friends of convoy 71, that left on the 13th of April 1944 for Auschwitz via the Drancy camp and the Bobigny train station, 1500 imprisoned, of which 850 women, 624 men and 22 people whose identity was never known. Among them, 148 children under the age of ten and 34 children stolen from the Maison d’Izieu.

This installation is a tribute to the exceptional political career of Simone Veil as well as to her past as a survivor of Auschwitz. I also wished to distinguish the memory of racial deportation from that of the Resistance. The members of the Resistance were actors of the Liberation of France, heroic figures. Racial deportees, Jews and Gypsies, to which belonged Simone Veil, her family and many of her friends, had not enrolled to fight for the freedom of France. They were simply Jewish, like the millions of men, women and children who were gassed in Auschwitz.

This installation is a tribute to these millions of dead.

David Teboul, filmmaker, video artist and documentary maker.

L’Aube – Dawn

Visual and audio installation by David Teboul in 2 parts (neon lights and sound)

Simone Veil se confie – Simone Veil confides in me, audio installation, duration 9 hours.

Birkenau – audio installation, duration 1h56min

Les arbres à Birkenau – Trees in Birkenau, neon lights – 3m x 4m (circa)

La Force de l’Art 02 : Grand Palais

LA FORCE DE L’ART

Ministry of Culture and Communication / Delegation to the Visual Arts
Curators: Jean-Louis Froment, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Didier Ottinger
Architect: Philippe Rahm

A three-year event, organized at the initiative of the Ministry of Culture and Communication, La Force de L’Art aims to offer a stage for contemporary creation in France and the artists who animate it, through the diversity of their origins and their aesthetic choices. Second edition of this event, La Force de l’Art 02 will unfold from the nave of the Grand Palais in Paris, from April 24th to June 1st, 2009.