Les commissaires anonymes

Material contingencies

Mathilde — 2019-05-18T13:09:00Z

Material contingencies presents contemporary notions of “object” and “objecthood” and how they may or may not materialise. An exhibition with The History of Design and Curatorial Studies MA of Parsons School Paris.

With works by Forensic Architecture, Francis Alÿs, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Quentin Lazzareschi, Emilie Moutsis, Lawrence Weiner, Ana Maria Gallego.

We live in an age of contradictory relationship with materiality. The avant-gardes of the 1960s-1970s have expanded the field of art to include conceptual and immaterial practices; meanwhile, digital technologies have developed in a seemingly dematerialised realm of networks and interfaces. At the same time, digital economies have a social and environmental impact that is anything but immaterial. We also cannot ignore today's renewed interest in crafts and materiality in the arts, and how this reveals a need to reclaim the authenticity of an embodied experience.


Ruchanan Patarapanich, Multirec, 2019, Laëtitia Badaut-Haussmann Aussi loin mes yeux, 2016 ©A.Boulay

Where materiality had previously described the physical, tangible and concrete world of objects, we chose to explore shifting and blurring boundaries to consider a range of potential material forms:

an aquarium TV containing fish that do not require feeding, drops of concrete percolating through a coffee machine, electromagnetic waves appearing like a swarm of fireflies—and of course floors, walls, smells, air drafts, our bodies, your bodies.

Material Contingencies attempts to create zones through an assemblage of objects that radiate feelings, reactions and emotions. Each of these objects has a presence—a manner through which they appear to us in the world. This presence may eventually disappear into thin air. This is the strange contingency of material things.

With the amazing team of curators : Lama Alissa, Pamela Arellano, Jennifer Briasco, Reynaldo Gomez, Renée Hong, Nicolette Kabitsis, Sif Lindblad, Ruchanan Patarapanish & Jorge Torrens.

MÉTALANGUE

2017-08-22T21:27:00Z

Camille Bondon, Sofia Caesar & Luiza Crosman, Clôde Coulpier,
Juliette Goiffon & Charles Beauté, Joséphine Kaeppelin, Lich/Sprot 2000, Maud Marique, Eona Mc Callum, Grégoire Motte & Gabriel Mattei, Yoann Thommerel,Vikhi Vahavek with Adrien Tirtiaux on scenography

ISELP

Welcome to this reconstitution of a generic communication and working space.

Here, codified visual and textual languages encounter their diversions and misunderstandings. Some forms will attempt to tell you that it's not so easy. Or maybe, it is just that easy. How, within the constrained devices of daily life production, despite software, methodologies and timetables, do you invent intricate and original exchanges? Métalangue has no inhibitions.

Invited within the framework of SYNC ! to present our commitment to collective artistic organisations, we highlight the interactions of languages that exist between business models – paradigmatic in the art world as well – and the necessity to say and to make things. Metalangue is a frog in the throat of language management.

The exhibition consists of an OBEYA (a great hall or war room in traditional Japanese), a space for visualisation of artistic projects, and a space for sharing poetic strategies. There you will find an apologia of influences, a 'scratch & win' game fill-in form to strike through your useless emotions, advice regarding a far-away loved-one, the results of a Graphomotor exam, and advertisements to join the Sprot 2000 aerobic community.
A gallery of managerial graphics will accompany you on your visit, an ageless saga from the Freemasonry to the Lean management. The mediators could not be present for the whole duration of the exhibition, so tele-present robots have personified them. They use specially selected words and will know how to enlighten you about intimacy on the web.
Workers are leaving the factories, one step inside, one step outside – just wait for a moment, we still need you. Full time.
In the last part of the exhibition a space equipped for relaxation and coaching is awaiting you. Stroll amongst today's hyper poetry and you will always discover memories. Finally, take the time to wonder: what makes you itch?

We must not allow the grids and signs to be drained out. Between two silences, slip your tongue in the frame. Sweet and drooling, the tongues will be loosened; for the anonymous don't hide themselves, they interfere.

Slow and Speed Dating, a group working session, was open to artists and cultural workers, who attempted to share in an experimentation around collaborative working methodology. Les Commissaires Anonymes led a series of discussion protocols designed to question each other's work and respective collective practices. The methods that were tried out were borrowed from various organizational working models, and were followed directly or were loosely interpreted.
The day ended with a performative aerobic session from Sprot 2000 in the exhibition space.

COLLECTIVE DISORDER

2016-09-13T19:51:59Z

Adrien Giros, Mathilde Sauzet & Gabriel Mattei and Hu Wei

Greylight Project

Collective disorder presents the three performances with different modes of care and exchange calling the attention on the complexity of human interactions and power relations. These three forms attempt to create a common body even within the collective disorder that characterizes our current daily life. Alienation, imitation and dissolution are suggested to invent the freedom of one self into collective forms.

20.00 - A Spiral Dance, A Circuit by Hu Wei in collaboration with Astarti Athanasiadou

Hu Wei's video performance unfolded in three distinct parts: a dance of mirrored gestures with a dancer; a handheld experimental video piece; and the reading of an original text with the dancer. In a first duo, one agent directs the other as they mirror each other's language, but it soon becomes clear who is leading.
Then, a video work showing Hu Wei and the dancer curiously encountering an unknown (to-them) living organism suggests alternative subject-object relations. Finally, both speakers make commands, and speak out comments, thoughts, questions, and phrases such as “I am a rational animal”. A Spiral Dance, A Circuit asks: What is agency? When does divergence lead to opposition? How does circuitry develop the “capacity to be the other”?

20.45 - The disoriented cabaret by Mathilde Sauzet & Gabriel Mattei with Sonia Kazovsky, Pilar Mata Dupont and Germaine Sijstermans

This “cabaret” comprised of singing, spoken and instrumental parts is a fiction inspired by many articles that have been published between November 2015 and March 2016 and particularly ‘Molenbeek is not a ghetto' written by Alexandre Laumonier, in Le Monde the 27th of November 2015.
Bringing herself into the performance to direct the players, Mathilde calls attention to the rehearsal mode of this performance: it is fixed in the moment of becoming, never crystallizing into a so-called final performance.
This aspect of it critically reflects the political situation to which it refers (in Molenbeek, among other places), itself an unfolding chain of events and process of “systematic disorientation”.
Trying to find a form of encounter for these four artists, the characters sing: “Is art our ghetto?” Using the situation of Molenbeek, the work proposes more broadly a reflection about art as support of interactions with reality and art as a means of inclusion and exclusion.

21.30 – Black tea by Adrien Giros with Melissa Rondeau & Louis Richard

Black Tea is a sound experience composed of two performers and two subwoofers. Spectators are invited to take time to switch off together, listening to deep frequencies and tasting very old Chinese tea. Vibrations intensify as the light fades slowly. The spectators, who are sat on the ground, don't move and the gestures of serving tea are indefinitely repeated. Bodies are calmed and dissolve in time and space.

To order the newspaper “The Disoriented Cabaret” designed by Sophie Cure :

MONS INVISIBLE

2015-09-20T15:31:00Z

With the network Constructlab, collective Oiseaux Sans Tête, the artists and designers Thomas Lasbouygues, Luigi Coppola, Gabriel Mattei, Emmanuelle Roule, Johanna Dehio, Raccoon Brewery, and neighbours, travelers and partners...
Mons Invisible

“We are maybe reaching a moment of crisis in urban life, and Invisible cities are a dream which is born in the heart of impossible cities” wrote the writer Italo Calvino in 1972. Where do we stand today? What is making the city survive, or moreover, alive today?

A special program angled towards young people titled Mons ideals has been open for the citizens of Mons and artists from all over Europe to express their wishes and imperatives for the future. ConstructLab and Les commissaires anonymes have been invited to find a way to gather all these dynamics together into a space of meeting and confrontation. The name Invisible Mons is intended to not exert too heavy an influence on the project and to instead let it grow by social and empirical networking. Invisible Mons was a place where intuitions could be shared and tested before they were enacted, to affirm them as possible in the public and political sphere. Invisible Mons tacked the issue of the place of citizens and their social, symbolic and creative aspirations onto the fabric of urban spaces.

ConstructLab and its network of architects and designers built a wild rooftop garden on former military premises, building various facilities to host artists, guests and visitors for long and short term stays. The Agora was the main space, at the center. Les commissaires anonymes developed, during the four months of occupation, a program with the poetical and fictional methodology of “L'île des reunions” (The island of meetings), insular forms of gatherings.

See the book published here.

“To consider the invisible city is to wonder what is the nature of the social tie and the very particular way that society has of remaining elusive.” Bruno Latour

The principle of L'île des réunions :
▶ L'île des réunions is a space of gathering at the same time fictive and real.
▶ L'île des réunions has been drawn, built and used by artistic practices.
▶ L'île des réunions is a methodological tool composed by an visible and an invisible architecture: an “operational frame” and a “zone of uncertainty”.
▶ L'île des réunions is a socio-professional ritual, a hijack of institutionalized working forms, an organizational system to compose.
▶ L'île des réunions is a hypothesis.
▶ L'île des réunions is a commons, when the distinction between public and private space disappears.
▶ L'île des réunions is a curatorial research project around collaborative modes of work conducive to new forms of collective subjectivity.
▶ L'île des réunions is a political attempt for a « geo-social artistry and cunning rationality*. »

* Accelerationist manifesto, Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, 14 May 2013 to read here.

Do you have barbaric tastes?

2015-05-15T15:25:00Z

An exhibition curated with Nicolas De Ribou.
POPPOSITIONS

A reflection on the judgment of tastes when it comes to the acquisition of works of art: between the cultural engagement, the evaluation of cultural capital and the sentimental value.
Exhibition gathering artworks from five belgian private collections: Galila, Benedikt Van Der Vorst, Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Cédric and Cookie Liénart van Lidth de Jeude and Fondation Famille Servais.

Letter addressed to the collectors:

Galila, Benedikt Van Der Vorst, Frédéric de Goldschmidt, Cédric and Cookie Liénart van Lidth de Jeude, Alain Servais, what shapes your tastes?

Each of your collections is unique to each of your own backgrounds and yet each reflects a social and cultural unity. They beg us to ask: How do you select the works you acquire? By pure speculation? By impulse? Do you consider the works within a larger historical perspective? Is it based on those whom you meet? Is it to be engaged politically? Or is it tied to your social representation? How much of it is based on education, upbringing or social influence? How much of it is based on subjectivity? Do you feel constrained by already prevailing references? These are some of the questions that we would like to make public in order to demystify the person and character of the collector and the act of selecting and purchasing an artwork.

Do you have ‘barbaric taste'?
When it comes to the area of aesthetic judgment, common sense opposes ‘pure taste', that which is the taste of intellectual reflection, cultivated and strategic in favor of ‘barbaric taste', that which is considered low, vulgar or uncontrolled. In this open questioning on how one's taste is formed, and its influence on how culture is produced, we wish to identify amongst your collections what could be considered to be ‘barbaric taste': a taste that is alive and instinctive, sometimes uneducated and common, almost animal-like even.
The exhibition will open up the definition of ‘barbaric taste' with a selection of quite contrasting works ranging from both known and emerging artists, to mysterious works, common works, or the very intimate, bringing to light a certain dialogue and friction. The exhibition will represent this so called ‘savagery' and ‘barbarism' in the judgment of taste that becomes visible through the quest to understand the meaning of what is the constitution of a collection.

In his text Distinction : A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu says the following of taste, “Taste classifies and taste classifies the classifier.” As collectors, your tastes and the influence that they have on your acquisitions seem to favor the recognition of certain artists. Barbaric taste is one that undoes instituted hierarchies in order to change the rules. Barbaric taste tells you how to - do you - play in classification struggle.”

Exhibition with artworks of : Alice Janne, Francis Alys, Société Réaliste, Jamie Shovlin, Michael Johansson, Delphine Deguislage, Jeppe Hein, Chaises 1,2,3,4, Mazzacio & Drowilal, David de Tscharner, Aiko Hachisuka, Lode Geens, Camille Henrot, Maarten Vanden Eynde, Evol, Jacob Kassay, Gabriel Hartley, Pierre Ardouvin, Jeremiah Jonhson, Fertil & Teixidor, Asier Mendizabal, Neil Beloufa, Jenny Saville, Michael Johansson, Yarisal & Kublitz, James Capper, Dominique Blais, Wobbe Micha, Jodie Paulsen, Saâdane Afif, Alex Hubbard, Jurgen Ots, Georges Tony Stoll, Andrea Canepa, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Vuk Vidor, Julie Verhoeven, Jonathan Monk, Olve Sande, Anna Nordquist Andersson, Michael Dean, Jorge Mendez Blake, Viktoria Binschtok, Romuald Hazoumé, Christian Holdstad, Maanantai collective, Daniel Gordon, Davis Rhodes, Bjarne Melgaard, Sanja Ivekovic, Melissa Streckbauer, Marcos Chaves, Malik Sidibe, Jan De Vliegher, Roger Ballen, Mike Bouchet, Andy Boot, Frédéric Brulé Bouabré, Rainer Ganahl, Sanja Ivekovic, Kris Martin, Kyle Thurman, Padhi Friedberger, Edouard Manet, Philippe Petremant, Daan Van Golden, Jon Rafman, Carmelle Safdie, Ellen Kooi, Barthélémy Toguo, Pierrot Man, Susan Stockwell, Tom Molloy, Robert Kusmirovski, Rainier Lericolais, Sejla Kameric, Roger Ballen, Nobuyoshi Araki, Henriette Grahnert, Sebastiao Salgado, Youssef Nabil, Ann Hamilton, Henri Chopin, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Ghada Amer, Danh Vo, Kris Martin, Bernd Lohaus, Dewar&Gicquel, Lucas Jardin, Alighiero Boetti, Paulo Nazareth, Marcos Chaves, Jorge Pedro Nunez, Steven Baelen, Keith J. Varadi, Baptiste Debombourg , Christopher Coppers, Gustavo Artigas, Rafal Bujnowski, Xavier Pinon, Peter Coffin, Hans Eijkelboom, Guillaume Leblon, Walker Evans, John Baldessari, Cheri Samba, Adam Fuss, Malik Sidibe, Nick Van Woert, Bouchra Khalili, Yona Refman, Ivan Argote, Katarina Zdjelar, Daniela Ortiz, Laurel Nakadate, Arturo Hernandez Alcazar et Jennifer West.

No man is an island

2015-04-01T15:23:00Z

Guests : Grégory Jérome (sociologist), Mickaël Roy (art historian), Claire Migraine (curator), Alain Bernardini (artist), Joséphine Kaeppelin (artist), Romain Boulay (artist and leader of the collaborative workshop space MilleFeuilles in Nantes), Samuel Rivers-Moore (graphic designer), Rachel Vera Steinberg (curator), Jean-Damien Collin (coordinator for Les Nouveaux Commanditaires), Gabriel Mattei (conductor).
Works exhibited of the Frac Alsace collection from the artists Atelier Van Lieshout, Bertille Bak, Alain Bernardini, Franck Bragigand et Fabien Giraud.
www.bastioncommun.info
Frac Alsace

The seminar at the FRAC No body is an island takes place as part of a collective working programme organized with and for the artists of the Bastion 14, a residency and workshop in Strasbourg. Meetings, workshops and an exhibition have been developed during a year of research around the stakes of common interests and collaborative tools.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
John Donne

A romantic image of the lonely worker, of the outsider, sticks to the skin of the artist. Because academism always promotes the idea of artistic genius coming from one individual, preferably through waves of doubt or cathartic processes, because art schools teach more and more to students the obligation to differentiate themselves permanently from the competition and to systematically transgress collective rules to become an author with a capital “A”. But as original as their works are, are they forced to pit their practices against each other? Each artist attempts to create a language proper to his/her experience of the world, but is it not in order to interact with others?

“No body is an island” writes John Donne in 1624. With the image of the island, the poet describes the illusion of lonely accomplishment. Even if the workshop is still a space of respite where the artist can evolve alone, free and as creator, in this period of the budget cut, we are reminded even more that we can't survive as “island”. The artist, the same as everyone else, must invent how to become a “piece of the continent” as J. Donne mentions. But the nature of the “the common continent” has to be in a state of perpetual recomposition.. The opposite of unchangeable, what is common is always in transformation.

The Frac Alsace opened its exhibition space and its collection to Les commissaires anonymes and to the artists of the Bastion 14 for one week of discussion and actions around the notion of the commons.
Professionals from art and culture have been invited to share their experience on specific issues such as the critical exercise of conversation, the identity of a regional scene, feedback after residencies, the tools to share knowledge and networks, etc.
Artworks from the Frac Alsace collection were exhibited in the workshop space, inspiring discussions and thoughts. Strolling, speed dating, singing and rhythm exercises and collective cooking have also been experimented with as other ways to trigger our consciousness of the commons.

THE BEAUTY OF AUSTERITY

2014-05-11T15:19:00Z

Hannes Bernard & Guido Giglio
POPPOSITIONS

THE BEAUTY OF AUSTERITY is a proposition by Guido Giglio and Hannes Bernard on the means of wealth production and the effects of their apparent limitations. Guido Giglio produced the film The beauty of austerity about the ethics and aesthetics of austerity, the crisis of Europe and the future of the Third World. Hannes Bernard presents The end times, an economic report on cultural production in the Southern hemisphere. Could destitution be a creative way out for the renewal of Western culture?

Could destitution be a creative way out for the renewal of Western culture?

The Dexia Art Center is occupied by an empirical construction inspired by the structures used as small bars in the main towns of South Africa. Most often built illegally, theses places allow a particular sharing of urban spaces. In his text People as infrastructure, the sociologist and urbanist Abdou Maliq Simone takes the example of Johannesburg and emphasizes economic collaboration amongst inhabitants seemingly marginalized from urban life: “Though one of Africa's most urbanized settings, it is also seen as a place of ruins—of ruined urbanization, the ruining of Africa by urbanization. But in these ruins, something else besides decay might be happening. There is possibility that these ruins not only mask but also constitute a highly urbanized social infrastructure. This infrastructure is capable of facilitating the intersection of socialities so that expanded spaces of economic and cultural operation become available to residents of limited means.” (1)

Life can arise from ruin. THE BEAUTY OF AUSTERITY is proposed today as a critical and constructive tool to consider Western obsessions of “crisis”. Under politics and mediatory manipulations, it remains an ambivalent beauty: between the cynical fascination of repression and the poetic dimension of essentiality, austerity gives rise. “A spectre haunting Europe,” state the South-African and Brazilian artists. Our XXI century would cyclically be built and destroyed by the fear of not being any more at the top of the prosperity… “We shall not fear austerity but rather embrace it,” declares the voice. Nice image but now how can we lose our cultural dependence to superiority? “Lick my favela !” begins the song.

(1) People as infrastructure, Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg, AbdouMaliq Simone

ELDORADO MAXIMUM

2013-10-01T15:12:00Z

Etienne Boulanger, Bureau d'études, Exyzt, Léo Delafontaine, Alain Della Negra & Kaori Kinoshita, Julia Moroge, Jean-Sébastien Tacher et Léa Troulard
Hall des Chars

ELDORADO MAXIMUM tackles the ambiguous appropriation of the myth of Eldorado today. Capitalism has appropriated this legend as a founding portrayal of itself, preserving only the spectacular image of untold wealth, riches and easy pleasures. We propose a new typology of contemporary Eldorado.

Extract of the prologue :

10.09.2013

In 2014, Les commissaires anonymes move and set up house in Brussels. The Schengen borders are wide open; we just need a truck and the motivation to make of this place what we will soon call ‘home'. We are far from being the first French immigrants in Belgium. During the last few years, a number of artists, as well as the independently wealthy, have made the choice to move; for some they think that they will find in Brussels more liberty to create, and for others the move is with the wish to escape newly imposed taxes. Is the Belgium capital becoming a type of eldorado?

These simultaneous migrations of two very different social groups, with the same destination, were a starting point for this task to redefine the myth of the golden future: What ideas of the beyond motivate these groups to leave what one has already? What projections of the future lead such departures? What attractions prompt people to want to change cities or even countries? Cecile Roche Boutin and myself have left France, Paris and Strasbourg respectively, for the practical reasons of escaping high rent and low paying jobs. But those weren't our only reasons. If gold is the symbol of eldorado, we could make the hypothesis that it was never the one and only drive in the quest for a better future. Capitalism has appropriated from this legend as a founding portrayal of itself, preserving only the spectacular image of untold wealth, riches and easy pleasures. “Dubai, the new eldorado for collectors”, says a headline from Le Monde newspaper on March 23rd 2013, or “Nigeria, the new eldorado for Champagne” calls out the L'Union, the local paper for the Ardennes in May 2013. Having no personal capital to invest and grow ourselves, we are not able to identify with headlines such as these, which most ostensibly have been written to pique the interest of those with higher income. Since Les commissaires anonymes search a different type of wealth, the myth's very definition separates us from our fellow fiscal neighbours in paradise.

12.09.2013

A beach riddled with coconuts trees, on the other side of a walled border, or an alternative model of society: what would we not do to get there? The image of eldorado creates adrenaline; she manifests herself within each individual who's on the quest for change. Today our work as curators allows us to meet artists and other cultural players who possess such drive, and to thus enter into their stories and share with them in their adventures. The idealism, poetry and engagement of their initiatives doesn't supply the type of gold necessary to solve the dysfunctions of the global economy, but the quest that drives them is an invitation to refresh our own worn down representations of that something better found elsewhere, from money and the future in favour of new models for living.

15.09.2013

The quest for eldorado is also a tragic story. The appeal of gold will have led many souls full of illusions for a better future to their final end. This quest represents an appetite for gain and the lure for property that motivates capitalism. But what matters to us today, is the intent of these abstract and immediate territories on which our desire for transformation is built. Eldorado must remain a precarious space, without the promises of security, frontier, or absolutes for real wealth.

21.09.2013

“We shouldn't be afraid of austerity, but rather embrace it. Through austerity, we encounter resignation. But through austerity, we also meet each other.“ In the video The Beauty of Austerity 26, artists Guido Giglio and Hannes Bernard question the term of austerity, which has kept on conditioning western society into adopting a submissive and restrictive attitude. Respectively born in Brazil and South-Africa, these two artists warn us about the ambiguity of this western concept that mortifies bodies and souls to the benefit of capitalist economy. Their work proposes that we consider a creative and emancipating sobriety. So that the quest for a contemporary eldorado should remain a posture of resistance against disenchantment, an opposition tactic to fight moroseness, so as to generate multiple desires to transform the world.

Refractive indexes

2013-09-15T14:10:00Z

Juliette Goiffon & Charles Beauté
Galerie Eva Meyer

The exhibition Refractive Indexes summons the image of a mirage. A phenomenon involving the refraction of light rays, the mirage is not an erroneous perception of reality, but an actual natural phenomenon with strong poetic potential. It is a new interpretation which reality is subjected to, an additional means to challenge any univocal reading of our society. In these times of technological expansion, marked by digitization and dematerialization, can we still trust our own perceptions?

The mirage represents the image of both an exploration of different degrees of reality and a fanciful quest for truth. For its simultaneously instinctive and documented stance on current affairs of the physical and digital worlds, the work by the artistic duo Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté is a case in point. In the exhibition Refractive Indexes, these explorers of the era of world 3.0 are showing a series of works in which various phenomena pertaining to the media, science, and nature are put to the test of authenticity. The model of the mirage which the exhibition addresses allows one to consider the role of the gallery in its equivocal and transitory dimension. In the framework of this research on refraction, deviation and interpretation of earth, science and media data, the exhibition fittingly presents Galerie Eva Meyer as a space for experiences devoid of unvarying truth.

Les Commissaires Anonymes are presenting a selection of works produced between 2012 and 2013 by the artists Juliette Goiffon and Charles Beauté. Brought together on the basis of their cosmic approach, these pieces summon our world memory. John Young and Charles Duke walked on the Moon on April 21, 1972. What are the contemporary “refractions” of this world event? The exhibition takes the form of a sensitive investigation: Its aim is to enliven the impact of scientific, anthropological, and media-related rumors.

Juliette Goiffon observes perceptible social transformations. Charles Beauté explores the margins of communication and information. Both have been working together for years on comparing and contrasting paper and virtual data, and physical and digital matter. This exhibition is an opportunity to assess their joint research, which is both harmonious and incisive. Through their production of prints, installations, sculptures and screenings, the artists reveal the complexities of our society in the era of dematerialization. Innovative tools and the free sharing of information makes the Internet one of the central issues of their work. Les Commissaires Anonymes present this artist duo as an emblem of contemporary exploration, in search of technological and artistic rifts.

PRESS HERE TO STOP !

2013-05-19T14:04:00Z

Joséphine Kaeppelin
POPPOSITIONS

Les commissaires anonymes offer a reflection on “machines” and their interactions with human. Found throughout the Brass like the remnants of a thriving industrial era, cisterns, pipes and other metallic gears bear testament to the bustle of mechanical production in which many workers were involved. As all the major industrial production sites relocate out of Europe one by one, computers have come to replace manual labor and have become the only way for the West to remain in control in a globalised economy. The installation of a print on a large-format canvas, pretence of a giant screen in sleep mode, puts into perspective the evolution of technology, its obsolescence and the increasingly diffuse role of man in this process of constant renewal.

The work of Joséphine Kaeppelin notably revolves around the place of artists in Europe, faced with the necessities of post-industrial development. The combination of Internet and high-tech digital devices with traditional handcrafting methods is at the centre of her aesthetic and technical research. The selection of pieces presented for POPPOSITIONS, gathered under the title Press here to stop!, deals with human presence in the operation of new production and consumption tools. Can we really intervene in another role than that of the fascinated spectator?