Dynasty — 1 exposition, 2 lieux, 40 artistes, 80 propositions — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 11 → September 5, 2010

An exceptional collaboration between the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC.

This exhibition prospects for a new generation of artists and presents them in the entirety of the combined exhibition spaces of both the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC. Dynasty gathers over forty artists in nearly 5000 m2, and indicates the strong commitment of these two institutions to emergent talent as well as a new phase of collaboration between the building’s two wings.

In sync with the guidelines pre-established by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Fabrice Hergott and their team of peers, each artist is invited to show two works that resonate together: one in the Palais de Tokyo and the other in the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, thereby echoing the complementary nature of these two institutions and offering the artists unique opportunities to further develop the horizons of their artistic vision.

Stereo, symmetry, and dialectic — across a multiplicity of techniques and stylistic approaches, the project intends to reveal the energy that lives in these artists, as well as their investigations and their use of ambiguity or paradox.

Dynasty fits into on-going work of prospection conducted since 1977 by the ARC at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, notably with the Ateliers who have revealed numerous artists, and by the Modules of the Palais de Tokyo, which dedicates two month — long exhibitions to young talent.

The project seeks to take the pulse of emergent artistic sensibility in France, to underscore both the common ground and the divergences, and to promote these works on the international art scene. It attests to the artistic boom in Paris as well as in other regions, in schools and art centers, in the Frac and alternative art spaces.

Featured artists

01 — Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty presents Meixue (2010). Following a short entitled Liberdade (2009), this film examines the troubled romantic relationship between a young girl from the Chinese community and a young Englishman. Shifting as well as linguistic, geographical, and cultural differences, are also present in Visionary Iraq (2008). Projected at the Palais de Tokyo, this film is the story of a young Portuguese man who decides to leave family in order to deploy in Iraq. Gabriel Abrantes and Benjamin Crotty play all the parts in this drama — men, women, children, adolescents, and adults.

02 — Farah Atassi presents multiple works from the same series reflecting on destitute, emptiness and absence. These paintings describe impoverished spaces, both public and private, which she names “transition spaces.” In this vein, the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC presents four decrepit and deserted interiors (Basement, Transitional Home 2, Worker Room, Library) haunted by the Bauhaus, constructivism, or Bernard Buffet. For its part, the Palais de Tokyo exhibits Bathroom and The Studio, two universes in direct correlation with the space of this site for contemporary creation and, more particularly, with its abandoned basement. Born in Brussels in 1981. Lives and works in Paris.

03 — Laetitia Badaut Haussmann interrogates the memory of two locations. Thus, the cedar that she presents at Musée d’Art Moderne evokes the one that, once located in front of the Polish Embassy, was chopped down when the Embassy was demolished to make way for the construction of two institutions in 1937. At the Palais de Tokyo, a sonata rings out between the walls. She bewitches the visitor and reminds him of the dark hours of the Occupation, when the Germans stored hundreds of pianos confiscated from Jewish families in the basement of the building.

Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, No one returns I, 2010 Sound installation — 3’29’’ Production : Palais de Tokyo, Courtesy galerie Dohyang lee.

04 — Gaëlle Boucand presents at Palais de Tokyo five sculptures, Merkaba. Their production was inspired by a collage of genuine butterflies, specially preserved in an unaltered state. This relationship between ephemerality and conservation raises questions oscillating between an archaic esotericism and vague attempts de futurist cryogenics. In the space at Musée d’Art moderne, the artist projects a documentary film, Partis pour Croatan [Gone to Croatan] which takes its name from the Native American legend told by new-age zealot Hakim Bey. The film presents a raver community where lives are put on hold in favor of an intense collective experience. In the middle of a seemingly endless party where nighttime never falls — lasting seventy-two hours — the spectator loses his sense of time in an enclave that is increasingly isolated from the rest of the world.

05 — Mohamed Bourouissa projects Temps Mort (Dead Time), a film produced with a rigged cellular telephone. This pixilated correspondence between the artist and a detainee subtracts the prison space from the information in order to leave room for the imagination. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC presents Légendes (Legends), a documentary on street hawkers in the Barbes neighborhood of Paris. The illegal commerce unmasks itself via a precarious film device: the video cameras, which film from a subjective point, are worn by the vendors themselves. [media#1608]

06 — Guillaume Bresson interrogates the narrative phenomena that come out of his canvasses. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist exhibits scenes from underground parking garages where indetermination, or even the absence of action, prevails. Although the drama is shown in negative space, it does not appear less violent. The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC hosts four paintings. They portray the frames of these same events in a classic unity of time, space, and action. Guillaume Bresson seems to situate painting in a temporal gap, between photographic mise-en-scene and pictorial construction, news stories and historical painting, intrigue and the elusiveness of a gesture.

07 — Pierre-Laurent Cassière presents the installation Mag-Net at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC. A thin copper wire runs through the entire exhibition, picks up live electromagnetic fields, and then reveals them in the last rooms under the form of a drone. At the Palais de Tokyo, Pulse amplifies the infra-thin with the help of a Crookes radiometer. This object, which consists of a light bulb and ceramic vanes, has a laser beam passing through it. When exposed to heat, the vanes rotate, gather speed, and disrupt the beam. This produces an imperceptible sound phenomenon, captured and amplified by the artist.

08 — Yuhsin U. Chang’s art, permeated with Buddhism and the Shinto religion, draws on introspection and on a certain form of openness to the world. Her works mix organic materials with other substances and seem at once strange and common, intimate and unfamiliar. DYNASTY is the occasion to show Poussière [Dust], two imposing installations in situ at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC and at the Palais de Tokyo. These monuments invade the space in a supernatural manner similar to a body that is invisible, unfinished, and residual. Amorphous and precarious, these dust giants oscillate between the disintegration and regeneration.

09 — Stéphanie Cherpin drew on the depot yard for road maintenance from the City of Paris in order to father an ensemble of materials in forms sometimes unrecognizable. Harnested for their potential sculptural semantics, these “vestiges” of forms — that are at once aggressive, docile, meaningful, and tenuous — are cut-up, separated, and recombined with other elements according to her formal principles. After having created a plastic harmony between these components, the artist brutally carries out their separation. Her sculpture is split between the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC and the Palais de Tokyo.

Stéphanie Cherpin, Starving in the belly of a whale, 2009 Pine staircase, venetian blind strips, nylon security straps, paint — 300 × 400 × 145 cm

10 — Pauline Curnier Jardin presents a “film-performance” indicative of her work in general. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC exhibits Le Salon d’Alone, an opera consisting of 80 slides, two musicians, and a narrator. Labeled a “psychedelic slide opera,” this projection, which mixes absurdly with metaphysics, is an interpretation sung from inside a wonder-room. Similar to the slide show Ami [Friend] shown at the Palais de Tokyo, a number of her films, performances, songs, documentaries, fictions, and critical discourses, share a common record book. In Imaginez Maintenant [Imagine Now], Pauline Curnier Jardin appears with her band, Les Vraoums [The Va-vrooms], four women “performers” under 30. Their cultural references vary from Captain Spoke to David Bowie to Frida Kahlo. Les Vraoums render the exhibition space a veritable concert scene, which they exploit to the max by creating a new genre of cabaret and by reviving performance practices. Their concert will take place July 1st from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.

11 — Mélanie Delattre-Vogt presents two series of drawings, both inspired by a freezer manual from the 1970s. For the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC, Mélanie Delattre-Vogt produced nine large-format drawings (56 × 76 cm). Certain drawings originate from the freezer manual, while others are linked directly to chance discoveries, mislaid objects, misplaced photographs, or fragments half-hazardly selected from texts. The Palais de Tokyo presents twenty-one drawings of smaller formats that are woven together with an acoustic system, which creates a “sound shower” that transforms the spectator into an auditor.

12 — Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita present The Coming Race. This project consists of a series of photographs presented in Palais de Tokyo, and a conference cycle given at Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC. Through these slides, Alain Della Negra and Kaori Kinoshita give an account of their exploration of utopist European communities and draw the portrait of a new human genre, polymorphic and telepathic, for whom metal and sensorial perceptions stretches into invisible worlds.

13 — Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel present a monument of an unknown fisherman. This work explores the space between the modern fragmented sculpture and the contemplation promised by the leisure industry. Moreover, the artists show a monumental tapestry in the lobby of Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC that destructures the space and pushes the limits of sculpture.

14 — Bertrand Dezoteux is projecting two recent works. The Palais de Tokyo shows a fable entitled Zaldiaren Orena (2010), The Horse Hour. Set in 1943 in Basque country, the story takes place in a real life setting, populated with objects and strange situations borrowed from folklore and farm work. At the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC, the artist shows Biarritz (2010), a scene of mythological inspiration, a return to the origins of aquatic life, filmed at sea and subjected to the effects of waves.

15 — Rebecca Digne. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC, projects a film in which Rebecca Digne imposes a face to face with an ambiguous image of a young man, arms raised, as if in prayer, at once strange and fearsome — is he a wanted man or a pilgrim? The Palais de Tokyo projects Le Matelas [The Mattress]. This silent, black-and-white 16 mm film forms an endless loop and shows the “eponymous” object brought to life by an invisible force, without beginning or end.

Rebecca Digne, Kino-peinture, 2008 Film 16 mm, muet

16 — Antoine Dorotte produces two new works. At the Palais de Tokyo, Blow (2010) covers a wall surface of several tens of m2. The assemblage of the modules, a reference to the quartz-zinc cladding enhanced for contemporary architecture, puts forth a drawing so deliberately vague that it forms a nebula. At the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Antoine Dorotte reinterprets the symbolic image of the Ouroboros (the serpent biting its tail). SUITE D’O [Suite Water] (2010) is composed of metallic pieces used in the evacuation of rainwater, engraved with nitric acid. Each piece contains a number that is part of the Fibonacci sequence, a famous divisibility sequence.

17 — Julien Dubuisson shows two new works where the shapes are primed with negative and positive space. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist presents Visite extérieure d’une grotte [Visite of a Cave’s Outside]. Too small to be a full-fledged cavern, too big to be a scale model, the sculpture is seven meters of sprawling amorphous volume: solid, opaque and dense. At the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the artist exhibits Ghost Dance — fossilized footprints in concrete slabs. This work denotes sacred Native American dance, of which only the faintest trace remains today.

18 — Vincent Ganivet presents Caténaires (2009), an ensemble of sculptures divided between the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC. These freestanding cinderblock archs of different heights simultaniously evoked construction sites and the skeletons of roman cathedrals. In front of the suspended works, the catastroph seems imminent, but always postponed; they stand at poetic vanishing points, resulting in a sham, a mechanism “with no result” of his works.

Vincent Ganivet, Nuit Blanche, 2009 Parpaings

19 — Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni present two new series of works, split between the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / ARC and the Palais de Tokyo. On one side, Sans Titre (Et si quelque part quelque chose se mettait simplement à vous remplacer) — Untitled (And if somewhere something simply started to replace you) — is a computer calculating a zero equation for a time in the millions of billions of years, for which the final result can only be zero. On the other side, Sans Titre (La vallée Von Uexküll 1920 × 1080) and Sans Titre (La vallée Von Uexküll 4036 × 2048) — Untitled (The Von Uexküll Valley 1920 × 1080) and Untitled (The Von Uexküll Valley 4036 × 2048) respectively — are the first two works of a series that responds to a strict protocol: videos of the sunset are filmed without filter or lens, but with the help of a very high-definition video camera. These two pieces establish a world where the machine is the yardstick: a deaf otherness that already excludes man from its system and relegates him to the margins.

Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni, Last Manœuvres in the Dark, 2008 (Vue de l’installation au Palais de Tokyo) Enamelled terra cotta, steel and artificial intelligence — 98 4/9 × 511 7/9 × 984 2/9" — one piece Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Courtesy galerie Loevenbruck, Paris.

20 — Camille Henrot shows Dear Survivor, Let it Be Known that You are not Alone (2010). This project, shared by the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC and the Palais de Tokyo, proposes a face-off between the two institutions accomplished through the confrontation of two monumental works. First she breaks a ceramic plate measuring five meters in diameter and then divides the pieces to create two sculptures. Each edifice is propped up, a precarious display, of a fragile and massive work that resists destruction.

21 — Louise Hervé and Chloé Maillet present L’homme le plus fort du monde (stratigraphie) [The Strongest Man in the World (a Stratigraphy)]. The Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which are established in the same neo-Roman building, become the location of an archeological excavation. Through snippets of the epic mise-en-scene of Hercules on one hand and Maciste on the other, the visitor is called upon to surmise the collusion between these films and the architecture of this building built in 1937.

22 — Armand Jalut shows a set of paintings and pastel drawings. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist most notably presents his triptych Lapin Smarties (2008) [Smarties Rabbit], depicting a rabbit surrounded by chocolate multicolored candies, which provides a window into an unlikely feast. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, exhibits for its part the series Canapés (2008-2010) [Sofas] : couches, which have been ripped apart by cat claws, emit delicate soap bubbles. At once kitsch and strange, these works touch on the processes of shifting, enlarging, and even sexualizing forms.

23 — Laurent Le Deunff. Abandonment, recycling and collection are just a few of the many transitory states that the artiste explores for DYNASTY. At the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC lies a Matelas [Mattress] made of wood eroded by the ocean and a Mammouth [Mammoth] made of cardboard found outside after the spring snowmelt. The Palais de Tokyo presents Skull, a skull composed of a year’s worth of nail clippings. Here, the return to a state of nature can only takes place through material practice.

Laurent Le Deunff, Ruine, 2008 15000 Kaplas — 480 × 240 × 179 cm

24 — Benoît Maire. For the occasion of DYNASTY, the Palais de Tokyo shows Le Nez [The Nose] (2010), a bronze sculpture accompanied by texts and drawings, forming a kind of metadata of the work. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC projects the text of this sculpture and hosts La Caverne (The Cavern): an installation composed of mirrors, chairs and a telescope.

25 — Vincent Mauger invades the architecture of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris/ARC and the Palais de Tokyo. On one side, a structure climbs to the ceiling, on the other, a work proliferates on the floor. Between the scale models of majestic nature and mineral panoramas, the artist reconfigures these exhibition spaces as hostile territories, as constantly changing jungles that are strangely familiar.

Vincent Mauger, Sans titre, 2009 (Vue de l’installation, Lieu Unique) Pièce produite dans le cadre d’Estuaire 2009 et présentée au Lieu Unique à Nantes

26 — Robin Meier and Ali Momeni. For Imaginez Maintenant [Imagine Now], they propose a new installation consisting of a hanging garden of speakers, suspended at eye level, located at the entrance to Dufy Room at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris. In this cocoon, this engulfing environment, the visitor uncovers the electromagnetic activity that surrounds him — invisible, but nonetheless omnipresent. From July 2 to September 5, Robin Meier and Ali Momeni establishes a live connection with an observatory that records the sounds of stars as well as sonar pulses and integrates them with other sources.

27 — Théo Mercier exhibits Le Solitaire [The Loner], a 3-meter high giant sculpted from spaghetti. Although Théo Mercier creates the spectacular with food, his work is concerned above all else with expectation and sadness. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist presents five totems: gods of earth, hair, glass, wood and flesh. Usually absents from museums, these impoverished gods — lame, ugly and wizened — find a pedestal, here. These mutant idols that the artist modeled after man are deformed, decadent and borderline.

28 — Nicolas Milhé shows a monumental work at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC. The lighted sign, Respublica (2009), takes the shape of a neon ad seen on the roofs of buildings. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist exhibits a split wall, Meurtrière [Arrowslit] (2009). A throwback to medieval barbarism, the work transforms the museum space into a fortress — a territory under surveillance. Nicolas Milhé shows a monumental work at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC. The lighted sign, Respublica (2009), takes the shape of a neon ad seen on the roofs of buildings. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist exhibits a split wall, Meurtrière [Arrowslit] (2009). A throwback to medieval barbarism, the work transforms the museum space into a fortress — a territory under surveillance.

Nicolas Milhé, Meurtrière ( Dolomites ), 2009 (Vue de l’exposition Casus Belli Frac Aquitaine) Pin, medium, papier peint — 200 × 300 × 25 cm Courtesy de l’artiste

29 — Benoit-Marie Moriceau focuses on the notion of dissimulation. At the MAM, the artist exhibits a photograph, showing the museographical display of the Egyptian Antiquities Department in the Louvre, circa 1905. The image — a reverse shot from Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires of a particular element from the set — shrouds the presence of a secret passage, or perhaps a black monochrome. At the Palais de Tokyo, the artist reinstates a model of a personal bomb shelter, shown here above ground as a useless object — overexposed.  The construction of this cell, conceived of in the 1950s, were in accordance with Open Source practices that permit unlimited physical modifications.

30 — Jorge Pedro Nunez. On the occasion of DYNASTY, the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC shows Sans titre [No Title]. A mishmash of different objects and furniture salvaged from the museum storerooms, the work suggests a rereading of Architekton, a series of architectural scale models produced by Kasimir Malévitch in the 1920s. The artist plays with the instability between distinct cultural contexts, associating the supremacism of the everyday object. At the Palais de Tokyo, Jorge Pedro Nunez erects a sculptural Homage to Simon Rodia — artist of the famous Watts Towers in Los Angeles — The Watts Towers (nuestro pueblo) (2009). This parallel questions the manner in which a sum of objects and individuals can “have mass” and gather together in a monument in public space.

Pedro Nunez, The Watts towers, en collaboration avec Laetita Badaut Haussmann, 2009 Installation

31 — Masahide Otani presents Volets clos (2010) [Closed Shutters]. This series of identical sculptures repeats the form of a closed shutter. Installed side by side, the castings preclude the spectator, and keep out of his reach. At the Palais de Tokyo, Masahide Otani exposes Je-fait (2007) [Me-made], sculpture-structure that reuses the design of scaffolding. This modular work reveals the inconsistent shifts in the empty spacing surrounds it. It seems to foretell the eventual conversion of the exhibition space into a construction zone, immediately contradicted by its own futility.

Masahide Otani, What day is it today ?, 2007 Matériaux divers

32 — Florian Pugnaire and David Raffini show singular intervention at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC. The confrontation of films, sculptures and paintings multiplies the loss of landmarks and the discrepancies between the points of view presented by the different forms. Also, the Palais de Tokyo exhibits a collaborative film entitled Casse Pipe [Headed for Disaster]. In this work, the artists stage the reenactment of a Napoleonic battle, projected in different moments in the space-time continuum, confusing the documentary gaze and the subjective gaze.

33 — Jean-Xavier Renaud proposes a disjointed display that punctuates the exhibition spaces with diverse images, inspired by his excesses, by his engagements and by his poetic eccentricities. The Palais de Tokyo exhibition space hosts a large drawing in china marker, entitled Le Conseil municipal (Town Council).

34 — Raphaëlle Ricol shows a selection of paintings. The Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC presents among others La lutte des places [The Place Struggle], Le soleil noir [The Black Sun] and l’Enfant Soldat [Child Soldier], such evocative titles for such uncompromising paintings. At Palais de Tokyo, Raphaëlle Ricol builds a world inhabited by characters such as Spiderman and Michael Jackson. This population of entertaining characters reveals nevertheless internal monsters similar to the many physiological and mental transformations that are strongly alluded to in the titles: a make-believe paranoia, an internal mutation…

35 — Bettina Samson exhibits at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC a series of works inspired by the Becquerel family — Edmond (1820-91) and Henri (1852-1908) — who one after another discovered the solar spectrum and radioactivity. The Palais de Tokyo presents Warren, 1/4 de seconde en Cinémascope [1/4 of a second in Cinemascope] (2007), which consists of seven portraits of Warren Oates; their likeness sculpted after photograms taken from a scene in La Horde sauvage [The Wild Bunch] (1969), by S. Peckinpah.

Bettina Samson, Warren, 1/4 de seconde en Cinémascope, 0 Installation, sept faïences, dalles de caoutchouc recyclé — 40 × 25 × 25 cm chacune Courtesy de l’artiste

36 — Alexandre Singh exhibits two variations of Assembly Instructions. Through the intervention of a photocopier, two iconographic systems or two parallel theorems seem to depict world order. All in all, these vast cartographic machines recreate the Big Bang via a sorter.

Alexandre Singh, Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logic), 2009 Harris Lieberman gallery, New York

37 — Oscar Tuazon shows a series of sculptures designed to reveal spatial tensions. They contaminate the exhibition space by altering perception, experience, and even functional usage. The Palais de Tokyo hosts Kodiak, a sculpture produced in collaboration with his brother Eli Hansen, born from an attempt to build a shelter in the hostile environment of Kodiak Island, Alaska.

Oscar Tuazon, Kodiac, 2008 Wood, steel, sheetrock, photograph

38 — Cyril Verde invites Mathis Collins to continue this collaboration. From a 19th-century print of a geological section, they tell the story together of the 8th artesian well in Paris, hypothetically located where Palais de Tokyo stands today. Thus Verde and Collins suggest a monument in homage to the wells here. At the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC, the artists present a collection of documents gathered during their research. These documents, either found or borrowed from other institutions, are also accompanied by graphic works.

39 — Duncan Wylie proposes four large-format paintings. They place the spectator in the heart of an event where order and chaos constitute a terrain ripe for experimentation. At the Palais de Tokyo, Duncan Wylie proceeds in the opposite manner, exposing only one very large-scale canvas, inspired by three documents. The telescoping of these images interweaves parallels between the recent earthquake in Haiti, the reconstruction of German cities after WWII, and the strength and the lunacy of man in a natural universe, as portrayed by Werner Herzog is Fitzcarraldo (1982).

40 — Chen Yang projects Belle journée [Nice Day] at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris /ARC. The video shows an aquarium in a construction zone. The fish rush about in order to escape the accumulation of sugar cubes. This is a metaphor for the distress felt by people faced with the planned destruction of their homes. The Palais de Tokyo projects Instant, a film that is particularly intimate. Situated on his grandfather’s stomach, the video camera records the movement of his respiration. Here, breath evokes the intermittent relationship between the past and the present.