Ezra Nahmad — Chinesedream — Les Douches la Galerie — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 23 → July 26, 2014

“Officials and scholars from around the world offered diverse views of how the Chinese Dream concept championed by President Xi Jinping will benefit the country and the world at the International Dialogue on the Chinese Dream seminar in Shanghai on Saturday.”

China Daily, December 8th, 2013

Chinesedream juxtaposes two utopias : the Chinese Dream, an ideology recently created by the Chinese Communist party and modeled after both the American dream and the Maoist dream.

Pictures produced in China in 2013 are arranged with documentary images dating back to the Maoist era, approximately between the 1950’s and 1970’s. Juxtaposing these two sorts of images, both in a synchronic and anachronic manner, brings about a contradictory perception, an overlapping of times, of periods and vantage points. In Chinesedream, there is an association of images that could be a collage but isn’t. Rather the effect comes from virtual archiving of facts and of time exposed in a pattern of reciprocal intrusions, and by so doing provoke a desire for history. Chinesedream is also the extension of a series of paintings in the 1990’s by Ezra Nahmad. Some of these canvasses are on exhibit.