Latifa Echakhch — Prix Marcel Duchamp 2013 — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: October 8, 2014 → January 26, 2015

Play Latifa Echakhch — Prix Marcel Duchamp 2013 Présentation de l’exposition par l’artiste Latifa Echakhch, lauréate du Prix Marcel Duchamp 2013

Espace 315, Level 1

Latifa Echakhch has devised a specific project for the Centre Pompidou, which follows on from other exhibitions : Latifa Echakhch. Goodbye Horses at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 2011, The scene takes place at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery in 2013, and All around fades to a heavy sound at the kamel mennour gallery this year. In all these exhibitions, Latifa Echakhch explored an idea where circuses and shows become ghostly spectacles emptied of public and performers following “nobody knows” what kind of events or disasters.

With Espace 315, the artist once more places ideas about the stage, decorum and traces at the heart of her approach. The exhibition, consisting of several sculptural components, has a strongly unified feel. The artist seeks to build up a dramatic scene. By making play with the backstage area, the whole work suggests a wide range of meanings and interpretations ranging from a disappointing materiality to images of mental landscapes. Latifa Echakhch transforms the venue into a dense, dreamlike place halfway between earth and sky, frozen in a twilight world.

As they move around, visitors discover different fragments of history, objects that are almost derisory, and recollections of childhood drawn from the very depths of memory, then immersed in black ink.

“The jury were impressed by the way Latifa Echakhch brings out all the potential of the space she fills by using easily recognisable elements,” says jury president Alfred Pacquement. “Her work, halfway between Surrealism and Conceptualism, poses succinct, precise questions on the importance of symbols, and conveys the fragility of modernism. The artist does not force a specific reading of her works on the viewer : she leaves their meaning open, free from any dogmatism.”

The artist was acclaimed for her work as a whole, presented to the jury of the Prix Marcel Duchamp by her reporter, Rein Wolfs, director of the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. She follows on from the two-man team of Dewar & Gicquel, winners of the 2012 Prix Marcel Duchamp 2012.