Akadémia : Performing Life — Villa Vassilieff — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 13 → March 24, 2018

Curators : Solvita Krese, Inga Lāce, Camille Chenais

The exhibition “Akademia: Performing Life” will look at narratives and themes springing from Akademia, a community and an alternative school that offered courses in dance, art and crafts, hosted an art gallery and a publishing house and staged theatre and dance pieces between the 1910s and 1970s in Paris. Established by Raymond Duncan, American dancer and artist, and since the 1920s co-run by Aia Bertrand, a dancer, writer and an expatriate from Latvia, the Akademia was a manifestation of their ideological syncretism blending socialist principles, the desire to revive ancient Greece and a “natural” Latvian way of life. The exhibition aims to explore the ideas and principles embodied by Akademia at its inception as potential alternatives to traditional models of education, creation and community life, while also questioning its more obscure aspects.

Vue de l’exposition Photo : Camille Talent

“Akademia: Perfoming Life” unfolds over two chapters at Villa Vassillief, Paris and Latvian National Museum of Art; the exhibition is coproduced by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art and Bétonsalon — Center for Art and Research.