Ryan Gander — Esperluette — Bibliothèque d’artiste — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 28, 2012 → January 7, 2013

Esperluette inaugurates the Bibliothèques d’artiste program. The title of this exhibition designates the logogram “&”, a ligatured way of writing the coordinating conjunction “and”. This expression interlinks several concepts into a single relationship, a fundamental principle in the artist’s work.

The central installation, Ampersand (the english word for “esperluette”), is presented as a giant white cube, closed and impenetrable. Only a small opening permits the visitor to stealthily observe the scrolling of a series of objects on a conveyor belt and “envisage their significance, be it cultural, historical, financial, or personal”. These objects from everyday life, ordinary and insignificant, are taken from ryan gander’s collection. a total of more than 75 elements are presented, like the brick fireplace by albers, caps, tests for sharpness of sight, tiles, a Japanese china set, and a mushroom knife.

This slide show of objects — a real window open on to the artist’s mental landscape — invites the viewer to reconstruct this “curious collection of things”. Metamorphosed in this way, as a new setting these objects now have a stage, a real seeing machine, where all rapprochements can be envisaged. Cinematographic experience seems to underlie the setting up of this installation. every object is a shot whose effect depends on its relative position in the sequence. each sequence in turn unfolds like an episode in a story running non-stop. movements, scrollings, changes of viewpoint: all the tricks of editing and staging are thus brought into play. Thanks to this device, the objects are now no more than forms, images, (co)existing in a shared presence.

The works in the exhibition are based on a system with multiple references, a puzzle. The artist is fond of the association of ideas, as in the cycle of lecture- performances he has been developing since 2002, entitled Loose Associations. The sound installations distributed round the building, the self-service posters, and the central installation are the fragments of a framed story. Behind this reading on several levels a huge set of clues to be deciphered is hidden, encouraging visitors to make their own connections, invent their own story, solve the puzzle — with no solution — set by the artist.