Alt+R, Alternative Réalité — Exposition des lauréats Audi Talents — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 21 → July 14, 2019

Audi talents ambition is to accompany emergent artists during the production of their projects and the conception of an exhibition. All of the works, presented for the first time as part of this exhibition, were produced thanks to the support of this programme.

A pun on the so-called “alternative” facts which have invaded the media and the communication of our era, the show “alt+R, Alternative Reality” reminds us how imaginary remains an artistic power, not in order to falsify reality, but rather to offer plural readings of it, at the service of our emancipation and the refreshment of our horizons. The beneficiaries of the Audi talents programme — the three installations being presented at the Palais de Tokyo — are prospective journeys into history and into the stories that mould our era, derived from new technologies, art discourses and a future greedy for science and political fiction.

The beneficiaries of the Audi talents programme — the three installations being presented at the Palais de Tokyo — are prospective journeys into history and into the stories that mould our era, derived from new technologies, art discourses and a future greedy for science and political fiction.

Curator: Gaël Charbau

Artists:

With Terre seconde (Second Earth), Grégory Chatonsky projects us into the immediate future of fantasies about an artificial intelligence nourished by “deep learning”, producing original images and objects coming from machines’ statistical calculations. Drawing on the infinite repertoire of forms available on the web, this recursive network of neurones constantly invents images that seem to come from a collective unconsciousness. The entire installation invites us to cross through different experiences and experiments which constitute the initial state of this Terre seconde, inhabited by digital chimera.

In Al Qamar, Marielle Chabal takes us into the environment of a libertarian community, which originated in the founding, in 2024, of the “City of the Moon” (Al Qamar) in the outskirts of Jericho in Palestine. The installation plunges us into the heart of this fiction, which the artist has been working on for several years, producing texts and objects which determine the contours of this new society. Shown here as a preview, the project takes form in the production of a film which attempts to undo the colonial cleavages established by the very setting-up of the Al Qamar community in a conflict zone (in this case, the Palestinian territory). The installation is a face-to-face presentation of mock-ups of the city’s buildings, costumes and other documents and accessories used for shooting the short film, produced thanks to the assistance of the Audi talents programme.

The exhibition concludes with Picrochole — Le rêve de Paul by Léonard Martin, in which the artist draws up a fantastical portrait of Paolo Uccello, the famous Italian quattrocento painter, who was obsessed by geometry and whose “Battle of San Romano” (1455) marked art history. The installation begins by unveiling three large puppets, like knights who have escaped from the master’s paintings, or poetic carcasses covered by graphic signs. At the centre of the installation, an “arena” in which knights reproduced as small-scale models, confront each other symbolically in a chaotic choreography, while the back of the installation displays a video deployed across three screens, on which these puppets have been staged undertaking a genuine filmic journey: thought out as an assembly of sonorities linked to these combatants’ bodies and the materials that protect them, the film has been written like a dream, in which the artist decided to imbricate these knightly characters into the very substance of the landscape.