The Promise of Moving Things — The Registry of Promise : part 3 — Le Crédac, Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 11 → December 21, 2014

The Promise of Moving Things — Le Crédac Basée sur l’idée de la promesse, « The Promise of Moving Things » en questionne les modalités, voire même la possibilité au long d’un parcours qui, s’il est un peu court, n’en demeure pas moins parfaitement articulé et et tout à fait intelligent.

The Registry of Promise is a series of exhibitions that reflect on our increasingly fraught relationship with what the future may or may not hold in store for us. These exhibitions engage and play upon the various readings of promise as something that simultaneously anticipates a future, its fulfillment or lack thereof, as well as a kind of inevitability, both positive or negative.

Antoine Nessi, Machine fantôme 5, 2012 Fonte d’aluminium — 210 × 140 × 80 cm Photo © Antoine Nessi

Taking place over the course of approximately one year, The Registry of Promise consists of four autonomous, inter-related exhibitions, which can be read as individual chapters in a book. It has been inaugurated by The Promise of Melancholy and Ecology at the Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, then followed by The Promise of Multiple Temporalities at Parc Saint Léger, Pougues-Les-Eaux, then The Promise of Moving Things at Crédac, Ivry, and will conclude with The Promise of Literature, Soothsaying and Speaking in Tongues at SBKM/De Vleeshal, Middelburg.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2010 Silicone — 25.4 × 10.16 × 10.16 cm Courtesy of the artist, Clifton Benevento, New York & Michael Benevento, Los Angeles

The third part of The Registry of Promise, The Promise of Moving Things deals with the so-called life of objects in our current pre-post-apocalyptic paradigm. Influenced in equal measure by animism, the much-discussed philosophical movement Object Oriented Ontology, the surrealism of Alberto Giacometti’s early masterpiece The Palace at 4 am (1932) and even the theoretical reflections of the Nouveau Roman novelist, theorist and editor Alain Robbe-Grillet (an OOOer, so to speak, well avant la lettre), The Promise of Moving Things seeks to address just that– the very idea that there exists some promise within objects in a world in which humans no longer roam the earth.

Neither a critical rejection nor an endorsement of these ideas, the exhibition embraces the ambiguity at the very heart of the word promise. It questions to what extent this negative faith in the cultural and animistic legacy of objects is a genuine rupture with the anthropocentric tradition of humanism and to what extent it is merely a perpetuation of it.