Take Care — Exposition collective — La Ferme du Buisson, Centre d’art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 3 → July 21, 2019

Take Care — La Ferme du Buisson, Noisiel Les œuvres réunies au Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, présentées pour la première fois en France, ont toutes en c... 2 - Bien Critique

Because care is a political and artistic issue, the Art Centre is presenting a reflexive and practice-based program this season on care. After a collective experiment with Myriam Lefkowitz and a solo show with Béatrice Balcou, in 2019 the Art Centre hosts a major exhibition entitled Take Care around which the Performance Day festival and Sheena Hoszko’s residence (The Limits of Care) are organized.

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Sheena Hoszko, Périmètre de la prison de la Santé avec clôture de sécurité en plastique orange (797,35 mètres) et murs bleus de pénitencier, 2019 Ferme du Buisson, courtesy de l’artiste © photo Émile Ouroumov

While the notion of care originates in medical and social services contexts, its many dimensions have been taken up by feminist scholars in Anglo-Saxon contexts, and at once complicated by people with disabilities, people of colour, and Indigenous artists, activists, and researchers. In this case, the exhibition’s title keeps the English term, “care,” which covers a more complex reality than the French “soins,” which only signifies healthcare or concern for someone/something’s well-being. Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher define care as "an activity characteristic of the human species that includes everything we do to maintain, perpetuate and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. This world includes our bodies, ourselves and our environment, which we seek to connect together in a complex network to support life.” Introduced in the academic and medical worlds in France, this notion is beginning to resonate across many other fields. In a French and global context of “care crisis”, it is important to revalue and politicize care by exploring the new forms and relationships it can engender.

Steven Eastwood, The Interval and the Instant, 2018 Ferme du Buisson, courtesy de l’artiste © photo Émile Ouroumov

As part of the Letters and Handshakes duo, Christine Shaw developed an introduction year-long program at the Blackwood Gallery with residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and publications involving over 150 artists, researchers, activists, curators, and care workers confronting the crisis of care Take Care at la Ferme du Buisson is a newly configured group exhibition based on this transversal project. In inviting a Canadian curator to present this exhibition, we are interested in mobilizing the questions activated by artists working elsewhere in the world, and examining how they could introduce new tools for exploring care in the French context.

The artists in this exhibition and offer new perspectives on the precariousness of artistic labour, gendered and racialized carework, economic crises, mass incarceration, mobility and migration, queer and non-conforming bodies, death and dying, and environmental stewardship. Their work questions how activism, mutual aid, feminism, indigenous knowledge, queer desire, creative survival, or a closer relationship to the land, can contribute to a better recognition of care as a powerful social and cultural force.

Julie Pellegrin