Dreamlandz — Air de Paris Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 2 → 31, 2010

For its last exhibition for the season — work by Christophe Herreros, Carsten Höller and Bruno Serralongue — Air de Paris has borrowed the title of the Centre Pompidou’s summer exhibition, with a Cronenberg-style “z” thrown in for good measure. Nothing dreamy about these “landz”, though: they’re very real and not so much idealised as travelled over (Christophe Herreros), modified (Carsten Höller) and checked out (Bruno Serralongue).

A recent participant at the Montrouge Salon, Christophe Herreros makes films comprising brief continuous shots shown as loops.

Once upon the End, his Dreamlandz presentation, is the second segment of a trilogy; the first was part of the exhibition of the top graduates of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the third was seen at the Young Artists Biennial in Mulhouse. Camera movement becomes the subject and even the narrative thread — the medium becomes the message. The film begins with a mise en scène using the codes of the cinema, follows up with an off-camera contemplation and seems, in the final stage of the dialectic, to unite the two in a closing static shot in which movement is no longer the camera’s prerogative, but rather that of the car the film began with.

In the summer of 1994 Bruno Serralongue attended all the local festivals in France’s Alpes Maritimes département: festivals devoted to local specialties or, on the contrary, setting out to create something new and exotic — at the risk of going kitsch. In 2000 he realized another series at the Universal Exposition in Hanover: in contrast with the liveliness of the preceding series, the new one contrasted presentation overkill with very limited attendances. Thus Serralongue demonstrated the disparity between the event as publicised and its reality, in two very different registers: financial resources and the facts. These two works are being shown in parallel at the exhibition “Feux de Camp” (Campfires), at the Jeu de Paume in Paris until the 5th of September, then travelling to La Virreina Centre de Imatge in Barcelona (November 2010 — January 2011).
A monograph is being published by Editions du Jeu de Paume, with JRPRingier bringing out the English version.

Carsten Höller’s latest series of etchings is based on photographs of genetically modified canaries.

Printed in fine gold — the canaries’ actual colour — the etchings show sterile birds of unorthodox shapes. Here Höller pursues his research into the shapes of living things and modifications of perception. Stimulated by technology, living systems increase and enhance their repertoire to the point of hallucination.