Satellite 5 — Programmation de Filipa Oliveira — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 21, 2012 → January 20, 2013

“Art is always contemporary, it is always about the present. The way that artists have looked at the present has changed drastically over time. The present is very different throughout times but even within the same generation. It is always a unique fragmented perspective, an entirely different country.

The idea of the everyday, the banality of the everyday, was brought into the realm of art, and since the beginning of modernism (at least in a specific vein of modernism) and became an ever-increasing drive. Bringing art down from its pedestal — a tendency of the post-modern quest — was aimed at approximating art with life. The poetics of everyday — the removal of an object from the ordinariness of each day — is symbolically evoked either through metaphors or through the direct appropriation of those emblematic or banal objects. Today, the way that these actions are exercised in artistic practice entail an inherent societal concern about the way we live our lives.

Some of the most interesting proposals in contemporary practice are concerned not with a straightforward approach to society’s problems (be them economic, political or cultural) but use an attitude towards the social world that resembles archaeological methodologies. The ordinary object becomes a sort of ethnographic item. The banality of the present is transformed into an unfamiliar territory, as if the present was a terra incognita, something not yet known (and thus extremely beautiful) that is investigated, researched, explored until a picture (or several) emerges. The pleasure of this rediscovery, of this exploration, lies not only on the artist’s practice, but as well as on the viewer’s perception of the works, on his/hers enticed curiosity. In a way, what is rescued from vulgarity is “the bit of life that’s caught between the cracks” (Nicholas Serrota). It is that that happens everyday without being seen — a sort of satellite events, which shape our everyday living.

The four exhibitions, dedicated to Jimmy Robert, Tamar Guimarães, Rosa Barba and Filipa César, considered together, the artists’ explorations of imagery and materials from the different ‘countries’ that constitute their present will hopefully affect our own understanding of history, culture and of our own lives. Most of the shown works of art — unstable, fragile and displaced — will be repositories of human existence, memory and time and a symbol of the history and identity of the present.”