The Half of Things
- View of the exhibition "The Half of Things" - second part, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010. Image: Aurélien Mole
Simon Fravega, Chloé Quenum, Jean-Charles de Quillacq, Clément Rodzielski, Benjamin Seror
A proposition by : Mélanie Bouteloup & Nicolas Fourgeaud
Three openings from 6pm to 9pm :
Tuesday 2th march
Tuesday 13th april
Tuesday 25th may
- View of the exhibition "The Half of Things" - third part, Bétonsalon - Center for Art and Research, Paris, 2010. Image: Aurélien Mole
The Half of Things is a project that brings together five artists in three successive exhibitions, accompanied by two publications. In this series of exhibitions, Betonsalon will serve both as a place of work and an exhibition space: the invited artists will have the options of working there from day to day or of working at a distance, and playing with the possibilities of a display that continuously evolves or of proposing deeply considered one-off performances. The exhibition will provide an opportunity for them to test some fragile aspects of their practices over a limited period or to go deeper with works in progress. The two publications will include interviews, artists’ writings, critical texts (literary or academic), scripts and more. The Half of Things offers the possibility
of a deep and critical encounter with the works of several artists of the same generation.
To varying degrees, the artists participating in this project share an approach that conceives of the exhibition as a pivotal site for the realization of the work. Each proposition can either make its process accessible or hide it; it can propose reified objects or, on the contrary, focus on the performative aspects of the artist’s practice. Each proposition will furthermore have the opportunity to emphasize one aspect or another, according to the paths taken by the projects and the artists’ shifting perspectives over the course of the exhibition. Confronting such practices, it is difficult to limit the work to a physical object or circumscribe it in an empirical way. Identifying the work becomes complex because it cannot be reduced to a thing that is simply
present in the here and now: the gestures and actions that preceded the display of objects or the creation of a performance, the announcement of events still to come, and even the production of documentation become decisive elements in articulating the meaning of the work. The Half of Things will shed light on practices that explore how
the long-time duration of the exhibition and the generative process determine the definition of a work, be it an object or a performance. The exhibition space, with all its limits, will, more or less, provide us with an account of those processes. Or of the ways in which an object can slip from being an object into being an event, and vice-versa, without anyone noticing…
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