La vie matérielle — 15e Prix Fondation d’entreprise Ricard — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 6 → November 2, 2013

Curated by Yann Chateigné for the 15th Prize Fondation d’entreprise Ricard

La Vie matérielle originated in the desire to design a more physical, more literal and in a sense more abstract exhibition than what I had had the opportunity to produce lately : a project founded on almost elemental gestures, tending towards a degree zero, a limited and committed language. Not to think with finished works, but from attitudes, with a leitmotiv, that of an exhibition with no subject or object: these gestures should have a material relation to the environment, whether they act on the context or have a capacity for transformation (appearing, changing positions, cutting…).

The exhibition is a kind of living mechanism. In it, forms have a life of their own. They refer to as many absent actions (past, present or to come). There would be something coming from the theater in this project, from an invisible choreography—not necessarily in terms of representation, but as a way to see things. La Vie matérielle, accordingly, would be an empty stage, a possible space where the economy (in the sense of the management of the home, of production, of poverty) would govern a desynchronized relation between bodies.

A material life inhabits the project. The title comes from a book by Marguerite Duras, who would have turned 100 next year. Through a blank, neutral, instinctive form, the book deals with the house, order and sex, social relations, writing and a changed world. For everything is given here, if hermetically: the presence of these forms, dissipation, entropy, and the tension between them, their “unrelation,” something like a return of the return of the real.

The catalog of the exhibition, designed in collaboration with French-Swiss review Criticism, brings together a series of critical texts and biographies as well as documents and an archive of the exhibition.

The graphic design of La Vie matérielle was created by Charles Mazé & Coline Sunier.

Artists
Stéphane Barbier-Bouvet, born in 1981 in Marseille. He lives and works between Amsterdam and Bruxelles.
Jonathan Binet, born in 1984 in Saint-Priest . He lives and works in Paris.
Alex Cecchetti, born in 1977 in Terni (Italy). He lives and works in Paris.
Caroline Mesquita, born in 1989 in Brest. She lives and works in Paris.
Chloé Quenum, born in 1983 in Paris. She lives and works in Paris.
Lili Reynaud Dewar, born in 1975 in La Rochelle. She lives and works between Grenoble, Geneva and Vienna.
Alexandre Singh, born in 1980 in Bordeaux. He lives and works in New York.
Benjamin Valenza, born in 1980 in Marseille. He lives and works between Bordeaux and Bruxelles.

15th Prix Fondation d’entreprise Ricard
The Prix Fondation d’entreprise Ricard will be awarded to one of the artists exhibited in La Vie matérielle on the occasion of the Bal jaune, held on October 25, 2013. The Prix is awarded by a jury of collectors, friends of the main museums of contemporary art and curators of the previous exhibitions for the Prix Fondation d’entreprise Ricard. It consists in the purchase of a work from the winner, which is then donated to the Centre Pompidou and presented in the permanent collections of the institution.

Yann Chateigné
Critic and curator Yann Chateigné has served as chair of the department of visual arts at the Haute école d’art et de design in Geneva since 2009. His responsibilities at the school also involve the direction of the curatorial institute and exhibition space LiveInYourHead as well as Fieldwork, a research and residency program spanning several locations (Geneva, Nantes and Marfa, Texas). Yann Chateigné is a graduate of the Ecole du Louvre in Paris.