La Pièce manquante — Analix Forever Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: July 7 → 25, 2020

The exhibition “The Missing Piece” addresses us, as spectators, multiple questions. A general one first: how is war “invented”, how is it made, how do we live with it, how do we die in it? A more specific question then, which refers to aesthetics: from a warlike conflict, how to extract forms that avoid the spectacular, the cliché and the morbid solicitation?

The Missing Piece also addresses the issues of testimonials: how are those constructed during ongoing conflicts? Who are the witnesses? The Missing Piece is neither a classical “war exhibition” nor a documentary one, despite the display, analysis and sharing of numerous documents. What the artists show here, what they analyze, decode, transform, is the construction and distortion of images by the actors of war, the creation of information, the fabrication of communication. The Missing Piece proposes an “off-screen” vision of the horror of the war. (Paul Ardenne, historian and art historian)

What does the title of the exhibition, “The Missing Piece”, refer to? First of all, The Missing Piece is a series of works by Guillaume Chamahian : using press photographs of the Bachar el-Assad family, the artist created puzzles. From these puzzles he removed one piece: Bachar el-Assad’s face. But “The Missing Piece” is also the home, the destroyed house that Randa Maddah shows in her video. It is the uninterrupted stream of AFP (Agence France Presse) dispatches, a background noise, a muffled, fragmented noise, a lost story that Julien Serve redraws. It is the notions of proof, truth and testimony that Frank Smith adresses through forensic poetry. Above all, “The Missing Piece” is what is missing, what was missing in this war: humanity itself. The missing are the dead, the lost, everything, everyone that war has destroyed.