Events
Tuesday 21th May 2013, 8pm
Andrew Norman Wilson, "Materials and What We Can Do", 2012
Lecture-performance
The work of Andrew Norman Wilson explores the materiality of media, and the processes, techniques and labour that compose it. The artist spent one year working on the site of Google’s head offices in California, taking particular interest in the day-to-day of employees in the "ScanOps" department, who digitize printed matter for Google’s Books project.
For the series of photographs "ScanOps" (2012), Andrew Norman Wilson collected anomalies found on Google Books over the years: images that have been distorted or badly scanned, ones in which the hands or fingers of the employees are visible, etc. The human presence of these anonymous workers confronts technical cogs, as well as the social system
of international business’ machinery. The artist has made no touch-ups or modifications to the format of the images. Once again for their framing, he has put several steps of production in place: work is sent to the framers; a paint is made to measure at a hardware store and then sprayed onto the frames by an autobody specialist. “Mistake” scans and photographs become “image-sculptures”. The performance "Materials and What We Can Do" (2012) follows from this project with a presentation employing corporate, academic and artistic lecture techniques in order to address labor, capital and the status of images: from the passage from one medium to another, to the re-materialisation of the virtual. (M.Be.)
Andrew Norman Wilson currently lives and works in New York. He is a 2011 recipient of the Dedalus Foundation MFA fellowship and the Edward Ryerson Fellowship. His work has been presented at the Images Festival in Toronto, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the transmediale in Berlin, the Eastern Bloc Center in Montreal, Yaffo 23 in Jerusalem, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Parsons, UCLA, Reed College and Tensta Kunsthall in Sweden.
Saturday 29th June, 11am
Guided tour and performance
Guided tour of the exhibition by Mélanie Bouteloup, curator of the show and director of Bétonsalon - Centre for art and research
Performance by Violaine Lochu
How do we remember oral forms? What transformations occur during the retelling of a story that was not conceived in writing? The artist and singer Violaine Lochu proposes two new takes on the question: a video and a performance. Chinesewhispers takes the popular game of broken telephone as its point of departure. A French nursery rhyme is repeated from one person to the next by non-francophones; mistakes of articulation and pronunciation slip easily into the telling and erode the meaning. In the video, the artist has compiled the material of these stories and repeats the transformed nursery rhyme as a ritornello. The performance Fabula pursues the same line of inquiry by presenting oblivion and fixation as two other factors in the alteration of an oral culture. Violaine Lochu takes up the tale of the Red Riding Hood, which has been transcribed from the oral tradition by numerous authors, including the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. In a play of intonations, silences, and recitation from memory, the artist reveals the rough patches, fissures and grey areas that form the fluctuating identity of all narratives of oral storytelling, and which become lost in the writing process. She puts into effect a complex dynamic of the intermingling, disappearances and reappearances, specific to folktales. Violaine Lochu poetically updates and redoubles the accidents inherent to all forms of oral transmission: oblivions, deformations and sudden appearances which make up the uncertainties of a thought that is at once alive, contingent and shared. (F.K)
Within the framework of the project « Les Narrateurs » for the 2013 edition of Hospitalités 2013 / tram
Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche, CAC Brétigny, YGREC ENSAPC, la maison rouge
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