And If… Just If… — Petra Koehle et Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin — Centre d'Art Contemporain Chanot CACC — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 25 → April 23, 2017

A proposition by Madeleine Mathé

The Centre d’art contemporain Chanot is pleased to anounce first solo show in France of duo Petra Koehle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin, from February 25th to Avril 23rd, echoing Le Mois de la Photographie du Grand Paris.

Born in 1977, Petra Koehle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit- Outhenin live and work in Zurich. The duo considers photography through a use of archive, a relation to memory or projection, and addresses the impact of representation systems towards collective memory.

For their first main solo show in France Petra Koehle and Nicolas Vermot-Petit-Outhenin conceived an on-going project in which architecture, photography and sound performance melt.

Established upon an allover installation, the exhibit places notions such as translation or transduction at the chore of the specific project. The score transforms CACC as an exhibition as well as a production space, and invits guest artists whos own research is in dialogue with the duo’s work. In order to extend this infinite work : Cello player Deborah Walker and as film makers Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson.

A double pattern led to the exibition “And If… Just if…”. The duo was first inspired by utopia and poetry of Saussure who attempted at the end of the late 18th Century to quantifie the intensity of the blue sky, and therefore invented a cyanometra. Secondly, by the analysis of Central African fabrics as reproduced in books in the early 20th Century, in the context of a colonial vision of the world. Those reminicences from the scientific field are placed in tension with a large scaffolding structure which invests the exhibition spaces.

The duo has invited Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson to present a new video work Opening Addres (pending removal impeding its ending) which explores the possibilities of translation and transduction between different regimes of signs: a text written by the artists, a sign-language interpretation, and the sound of a theremin. Cello player Deborah Walker is invited to improvise this exhibitscore twice, once on the opening night and once at the end of the show. This will be less a process of translation than of transduction, which is a translation to a new energetic space

The exhibition "And if…Just if… " takes place in the frame of Le Mois de la Photo du Grand Paris 2017. www.moisdelaphotodugrandparis.com

The exhibition is supported by Erna und Curt Burgauer Stiftung, and Annex 14-Zurich.

Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni‘s work is supported by Centre national des arts plastiques and les laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, in the frame of their residence “Common infra/ctions”

Public events