Les Nouveaux Mondes et les Anciens — Un territoire sans carte — Espace Khiasma — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 16 → June 16, 2012

The New Worlds and the Old presents about twenty recent works — mainly art films. The exhibition is conceived as a series of chapters spread over a period of three months. It is part of Interior Empires, a season dedicated to a re-reading of colonial heritage in the present.

The first two parts of this spring’s exhibition at Espace Khiasma, Traffic of Legends and A Bewitching of History, proposed a contemporary reading of the notion of the New World. The issue wasn’t a projection towards unknown lands anymore, but an experience of the marks left on the psyche by hybrid identities, forged by the “colonial moment” and an attempt to sketch out, through contemporary art, a troubling scheme of uncertainty. History needs to be played out again, in order to find new critical positions, to put new figures in the limelight, to elaborate alternative interpretations of facts.

The third part of the exhibition raises the issue of the map of this interior empire. The map as a rational method of representing the world, as a tool for distinguishing between identities, for defining what is legal, the map and its immaterial borders: can it exapand its image to cover this new world? Can it objectify dreams, ghosts and cunning spirits? The works presented are efforts towards new readings — be it by changing and re-evaluating non-western cartographic practices or by appropriating them in different contexts.

Numerous pieces also attempt to consider globalisation and the Internet as a basis for new fields of the sensible, new conceptions of space, New Worlds for us to grasp, beyond the frustration they may provoke.