BLESS — N°53 Contenttenders — Michèle didier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 22 → September 2, 2015

Made to measure by the creator BLESS for the publisher mfc-michèle didier

Halfway between fashion, design, architecture and art, BLESS is a collaborative evolving project founded in 1997 by the stylists and designers Desirée Heiss and Ines Kaag, who define, in their frame of work a new, personalized profession, of the spontaneous creator, always reacting to his personal life. Generating singular products of fashion, design or art — from a fur wig to a disposable T-shirt, — BLESS plays with the fashion world’s mechanisms of seduction, while developing formal, esthetic, economical, and press strategies, which radically put this world into question.

BLESS is a conceptual brand, thinking of new solutions for the everyday life. Here, for mfc-michèle didier, the duo thinks of the daily use of the artist’s book and the multiple, by creating quite surprising objects, the new BLESS N°53 Contenttenders. Playing with the double meaning of “tender content”, — in the sense of a “fragile content”, but also based on the sense of the verb “to tender, to offer”, they have imagined a sort of welcoming place, offered to a selection of artworks from mfc- michèle didier catalog. What’s softer than a pillow, in order to protect the publisher’s productions ? BLESS proposes pillows that are not supposed to lie under one’s head, but under an artwork which is therefore included in the intimate sphere.

The same way BLESS re-thinks all its objects, the pillow doesn’t remain this familiar tool, consisting of a form and a matter that everyone knows. BLESS accessorizes it, redirects its use, transforms it, so that it can host the book or the multiple the best possible way.

BLESS takes over Mes dessins secrets by Annette Messager and Underground (Fragments of Future Histories) by Liam Gillick, in order to place them into secret holes : the pillow becomes hollow, or gets pockets where the work can settle in. BLESS thinks of a pillow-blanket to envelop Braco Dimitrijevic’s Parc Event / P.P. Rubens — Gerda Bollen, but here it’s not a question of softness and smoothness, as the blanket is really sculpted in wood. Another pillow, equally stunning, displays the Dream Object Book by Jim Shaw. The pillow also becomes a bank revealing Hannah Collins’ work, Hair Shawl. Or it can even be a couple of sound pillows, male and female, in order to listen to the formulation of time in On Kawara’s One Million Years, or a page marker for Double Bind by Leigh Ledare.

BLESS N°53 contenttenders hosts Christian Marclay, a giant hammock, is installed in the middle of the gallery. As it name suggests, it consists of melodized pillows, playing the musical score of Ephemera by Christian Marclay. The concert given by Irène Schweizer, held on June 12, 2009 by mfc-michèle didier at the Bahnhof für Neue Musik in Basel, was the very first interpretation of the music score of Ephemera.

BLESS fits every style! BLESS imagines an ideal and unique solution for each and every artwork.

The exhibition is realized in the framework of the cycle of proposals imagined by Michèle Didier and Emanuele Quinz, inviting artists and designers to confront their work with the collection of works produced and published by mfc-michèle didier. The question is not to stage the productions as a whole collection of objects, nor to reactivate the works or the protocols, but moreover to conceive extensions and activate resonances. The cycle was launched with the exhibition Sexe, béatitude et logique comptable by Mathieu Mercier (from February 13 to March 7, 2015)