Medusa Caravage Salon — Dominique Fiat Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 22 → July 26, 2013

Medusa Caravage Salon is an open, evolving project. It is more than a simple exhibition underpinned by a certain curatorial mindset; it is about designing a space, a site for taking stock of shapes, contents and gestures that possess a range of meanings.

The works and objects were chosen at Galerie Dominique Fiat, as well as other galleries and private collections. Their selection was subjected to a constraint with respect to their use, i.e., the idea of associating artworks that have already been produced or reactivated for the occasion. In this intersubjective approach to laying out an exhibition, the semantic question seemed to correlate with the action of a multifaceted discourse, whether of the organizers (both institutional and private), the artworks, artist or visitors inscribed in a given context. Indeed, if we consider that objects and meaning are subject to a certain infl uence through the intermediary of the exhibition, then it is our wish to question those modalities and procedures here. Designed as a hybrid arrangement of an experimental laboratory, a beauty parlor, and a cabinet of curiosities, Medusa Caravage Salon stands as both a political and an aesthetic experience.

Political: We are speaking of the political here not as the politicized commitment of artists or works of art, but as Hannah Arendt thought of the term :

“Man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.”

Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics

Aesthetic: Medusa Caravage Salon constitutes a project occupying that intermediary space, a place of exchange and use, symbolic and real. In this common yet contradictory place, connections and dif- ferences are articulated. Here we examine, for example, what Jacques Rancière conjures up in Le Spectateur Émancipé as the effectiveness of a dissensus:

“What I mean by dissensus is not the confl ict of ideas or feelings. It is the confl ict of several sensorial regimes. It is along these lines that art, in the regime of aesthetic separation, borders on politics.”

Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé

Here the gallery space is configured in stages over the run of the show. Visitors will be able to follow the project’s evolution and attend a range of artists’ interventions, performances, video screenings and round-table discussions.

Medusa Caravage Salon aims to be a platform for exchanges, a shared space, a place where bodies, works and thoughts can freely circulate in a dynamic environment and time frame.

The project took shape around a series of exchanges between Rebecca Bournigault (artist), Dominique Fiat (gallery owner), and Massimiliano Baldassarri (artist/curator).