Une exposition mise en scène — La Ferme du Buisson, Centre d’art contemporain — Event — Slash Paris

Past: Saturday, September 11, 2021

Pursuing his investigation into the nature of an exhibition, curator Mathieu Copeland transposes the exhibition to the stage for the duration of a show. Descriptions of dreamed, real, or vanished artworks written by a dozen artists for A Staged Exhibition are interpreted through gestures, words and music by choreographer and dancer Jennifer Lacey and composer and musician Laetitia Sadier against a backdrop by Gaylen Gerber.

Following A Choreographed Exhibition, presented at the Contemporary Art Centre in 2008, and the book and the festival Choreographing Exhibitions in 2013, curator Mathieu Copeland returns to La Ferme du Buisson with A Staged Exhibition (Une exposition mise en scène). Working with the theatre’s spatial and temporal parameters, Copeland experiments and collaborates with Lacey and Sadier to interrogate the way works are articulated from one to the other, confronted in their singularity and interpreted as a tableau vivant that transposes works by an international and intergenerational grouping of artists including Art & Language, Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press, Robert Barry, Luis Camnitzer, Braco Dimitrijević, Coco Fusco, Giovanna, Joseph Grigely, Swetlana Heger, Florence Jung, Ghislaine Leung, David Medalla and Michael Portnoy.

Jennifer Lacey pursues her investigation in breaking free from the spectacular to find a playful and inventive hermeneutics of the body as she performs written or described works commissioned specifically for A Staged Exhibition. Laetitia Sadier enters into resonance, or dissonance, with the exhibition taking place in parallel to offer a sound exhibition within a staged one. In a minimalist setting, American artist Gaylen Gerber creates–for the first time in his career–a work for a theatrical context. Invited to reinterpret what a theatrical backdrop can be, Gerber continues his decades-long exploration of Backdrops and how they draw attention to the works presented and to their presentation.