Les Bourgeois de Vancouver — Denys Arcand / Adad Hannah — Centre culturel canadien — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 11 → May 16, 2015

A stone’s throw from the Musée Rodin, the Canadian Cultural Centre will be presenting an exhibition entirely devoted to one of the most famous French sculptors, and his monument Les Bourgeois de Calais (1885) in particular.

Called The Burghers of Vancouver, the exhibition has been put together by Adad Hannah, a Vancouver photographer and video artist, and Quebec filmmaker Denys Arcand. At its heart is a new video installation that revisits the idea of the urban monument by taking apart and putting back together the sculpted group using actors. The play recounts the story of the six actors commissioned by a mysterious patron to “act” Rodin’s work in the streets of Vancouver.

The exhibition also features other works by Adad Hannah that are profoundly influenced by Rodin’s sculpture : the series of photographs Unwrapping Rodin (2010), which transposes in the studio and using the memory the photographic decompositions produced in the late nineteenth century by Muybridge and Marey, the unwrapping of a copy of the statute of one of the six burghers of Calais, Pierre de Wissant ; a composition made up of screens, Les Bourgeois de Calais: Crated and Displaced (2010), which makes us consider our relationship to the image of a monument known through reproductions; as well as Age of Bronze, a series of three tableaux vivants produced in 2004 in a room of the National Gallery of Canada, a reflection on gender/genre (sexual and artistic), hierarchy (roles within an institution) and more generally on the relationship between the gaze and power, all of this focussing on a Rodin’s anti-academic male nude, a major work of 1877, which both gave rise to controversy and contributed to Rodin’s glory.

Curator : Catherine Bédard