Une exposition parlée — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 26 → May 12, 2013

Entretien — Mathieu Copeland, curateur Depuis 2004, Mathieu Copeland développe une réflexion curatoriale remarquée et identifiée. Invité par Marta Gili à s’emparer de la 6e édition de la programmation Satellite du Jeu de Paume, il articule pour l’occasion un double cycle de quatre expositions et de quatre publications qui sont, à l’image de sa démarche, ambitieuses et référencées.

The first exhibition conceived by Mathieu Copeland as part of the Jeu de Paume’s Satellite program envisages the exhibition of the word and the diffusion of an entire work orally. Combining writing and mental image, reading and listening, it questions the uniqueness of reading and speech, the place of the word in the exhibition, the question of the exhibition and the catalogue — or rather of the exhibition of the catalogue.

The — read — text makes possible its interpretation, thus becoming its score as well as its memory. “An exhibition to be read” generates figures to be said, the abstraction of language enabling a form to come into being and, naturally, once uttered, to dissolve. In parallel with this exhibition through the book a series of “spoken retrospectives” is presented. Gustav Metzger, who uses destruction and impermanence as motifs in his work, David Medalla, through the ephemeral and the impromptu, and others are invited to record with their voices an ideal retrospective of their work, or their lives. The motive and materiality of this undertaking can only exist — survive — through the non-documentary exhibition of a radical work, one that avoids as far as is possible the classic presentation of the retrospective. Each retrospective exists only through the words spoken by artists — through the memory of those who have created — thus generating the mental image of an exhibition of time (time of a work whose disappearance affirms its existence, time of a past life) in the minds of those who are listening.