L’histoire d’après — Commissariat : Charlotte Boudon — Les filles du calvaire Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 30 → July 28, 2018

This exhibition presents works by artists who focused their gaze on those of others.

It drifts from one to the next, from a story to the following. Many of these authors quote stories, most of them classified as documentary, and use them as the basis for new narratives. In so doing, a story is created where the documentation of another ended. Editing these new narratives, artists transform their material into archives, creating new meaning with existing images and paying tribute to the time that has gone and to that which remains after.

Press clippings, vintage photographs, illustrations from an anthropology book or from a touristic guide, a renowned photographic series from the 1960s, a 16th century Madonna painting… This material is the starting point for artists who begin where other put an end—to their stories and to the History. Hitting the road again, in the footsteps of others, these artists chose to go back to the past or to start there in order to veer towards a new direction. They chose traces to rewrite, with today’s words, the past in the present time, hence drafting the contemporary version of a classical, archived history.
Some of these artists use intangible materials—memory, mental images—which are necessarily impalpable and evanescent. Rather than documents that would testify, they use memory as a material to model, for its capacity to preserve and to trigger. Sitting on a fine line between art and documentary, some artworks emerge and develop in the double interpretation of a subjective experience of reality.
Choreographer and dancer Jérôme Bel* defines contemporary art as a way of finding new forms to speak about reality and about our planet. As the world is changing, the forms we use to tell its story certainly have to. When artists question these new ways of living, they question the past with regards to their present, the before and after, the contemporary in relations to its possible futures. They write chronicles and they testify, narrating two separate moments in time, of the people and the characters, the facts and the screenplays, the heathen and the sacred, and of the exegesis of all matter.
They go back and forth, from reality to staging, from documentary to fiction, from oral to writing, from reproduction to the transformation—a poetic drift.