Saâdane Afif — The Fountain Archives — Centre Georges Pompidou — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 1 → April 30, 2017

Saâdane Afif — Centre Pompidou Invité à présenter au Centre Pompidou ses Fountain Archives, Saâdane Afif rend un hommage appuyé à Marcel Duchamp tout en entraînant cette œuvre symbolique dans un champ conceptuel qui en poursuit le geste initial.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is 100 years old! To celebrate this anniversary, the Centre Pompidou is presenting a work by Saâdane Afif: The Fountain Archives. Since 2008, the artist has been collecting publications in which the famous ready-made is reproduced, giving rise to an unusual work that has been constantly growing ever since. The Fountain Archives contains two entities:

 — The first consists of pages torn from publications featuring a reproduction of Fountain. Each page is individually framed.

 — The second consists of the publications (varying from travel guides to books on art history) from which these images of Fountain were torn.

By removing one page from a publication printed in runs of hundreds or thousands, Saâdane Afif recreates the unique and singular. The torn page is unique, as is the amputated publication which, on its shelf, becomes a silent archive as well as a mould, a negative. Over the years, the artist’s work in progress has inspired many comments and publications which, as soon as a photograph of Fountain appeared in them, were likely to become part of it. Some of the torn-out pages show an image of these torn-out pages where Duchamp’s porcelain already belongs to The Fountain Archives. In this way, the project engenders its own material, and could end up by talking of itself as much as the historic urinal.

The dialectic reversal of reproduction and production, of the multiple and unique, emphasises what makes the art of Saâdane Afif so crucial: the poetics of a relaunching, rebounding process that counters the empty utopia of a self-sufficient work completely closed in on itself. In addition, in accordance with the protocol he has set up, the artist will be asking various authors to write lyrics based on The Fountain Archives. These texts will be seen on the walls of the exhibition room.