Ève Chabanon: The Surplus

From 29/01/2020 through 25/04/2020
Opening on Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Curated by Mélanie Bouteloup

In January 2020, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research presents The Surplus, Ève Chabanon’s first solo exhibition in France.

It is organized around the economic notion of « surplus », a term that refers to the difference between the amount a person would be willing to accept for a good, compared to what they can receive by selling it at the market price. The exhibition comes at a time when Ève Chabanon’s artistic practice is being redefined, as she has so far been involved in long-term projects involving marginalized territories and communities to create spaces for dialogue and creation. It constitutes both an inventory, a conclusion and a step aisde from the arborescent project The Surplus of the non-producer, started by Ève Chabanon in 2016, which challenges the notion of « surplus » to attribute it to those whom the artist calls «non-producers»: artists, craftspeople or professionals in exile and settled in the Paris region who, for economic, legal and administrative reasons, struggle to accomplish their practices.

Starting from the contradictions inherent in collaborative logics, the artist imagines an installation based on a series of functional and sculptural ceramic objects that blend different shapes, texts and images. Made available for sale during the exhibition, these objects question notions of value, economy and artisanal production in relation to which all visual artists necessarily define themselves. This speculation around objects and words, at the same time fictional, emotional and poetic, allows the artist to define her own surplus.

Ève Chabanon (1989, France) lives and works in Brussels. She graduated from the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (HEAR) in Strasbourg in 2013, before completing a Master’s Degree in Curating at the Sorbonne Université, Paris in 2014 and taking part in the Open School East in London and Margate in 2016.

She has undertaken residencies at the White House in Dagenham in 2017, at the FRAC Grand Large in Dunkirk in 2018 and at Te Whare Hēra, Wellington, New Zealand in 2019, following which her first solo exhibition, Eating Each Other, was held. She was awarded the Sciences Po prize for contemporary art in 2018 for her project The Anti-Social Social Club: Episode One, The Chamber of the Dispossessed. Her work has been exhibited in La Manutention, a performance program at the Palais de Tokyo in 2018, and in group shows such as The Stratagems of the Intellect at Parc Saint Léger in 2016, The center cannot hold at Lafayette Anticipations in 2018 and take (a)back the economy at the CAC Chanot, Clamart in 2019.

An exhibition co-produced by Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster where it will be reshaped in the summer of 2020. As part of the PERSPEKTIVE Fund for Contemporary Art & Architecture, an initiative of the Bureau des arts plastiques of the Institut français. Supported by the French Ministry of Culture and the Goethe Institut.