EFFE presents… Coup de coeur #1-5
photo credits : Guillaume Vieira
video credit: Ana Vaz
curated by Eleanor Weber
#1 Asta Meldal Lynge, 21-23 avril 2015
#2 Noémie Bablet – Shakkei, 15-22 mai 2015
#3 Elena Betros – The room limits established by us, 26-31 mai 2015
#4 Nuno da Luz – with Assisted Resonance, 18-21 juin 2015
#5 Signe Frederiksen – Les Insoumuses, 28 juin 2015
Cité internationale des arts
Studio #8106
18 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville
75004 Paris
design by Ella Sutherland
#1
Asta Meldal Lynge, 21-23 April 2015
photo credits : Frieder Haller
In
some new housing developments, the show-home or ‘marketing suite’ is finished
months, even years, before the actual apartments. The scaffolding, safety
regulations, cranes, and dust hang around until the bitter end, until just
before the curtain is pulled to reveal another giant vertical edifice to
private property. But housed cosily within all this haste, waste and cheap
labour is the projected future, the obligatory, un-thinking image of individual
success in the form of luxury apartment living. The image-home contained within
all this fabrication has a vital role to play. It seeks to make us blind the
construction just beyond the display-window of yet another cynical architecture
of competition. It wants us to ignore the shaky foundations upon which housing
for the largest profit margins, and therefore by the most exploitative means,
is made. These ‘homes’ are for those whose desire is the status that they
presume such manufactured luxury bestows upon them. They must no doubt know the
margin between selling the image and selling the building is thin; that is how speculative
economy works. Ideally, it will all be off the developer’s hands (and into his
pocket) before the curtain is pulled open. The longer the wait between the
reveal and the sell, the more chance that cracks will start to show and the
surfaces will start to date. Anxiety may set in, desperation, and the edifice
may start to crumble…
For
this exhibition, Asta Meldal Lynge presents a new short video work, Showhome
(2015). The video’s
structure reflects its content, balancing different modes of representation
according to the surrounding environment or 'set'. Continuing Asta’s ongoing interest in Materialist
film, Showhome presents the two sides
of the luxury housing development coin, combing this Structural approach with
her interest in human gesture and theatrical cinematic conventions, notably
through music. On one hand
we have unstable, furtive footage of the construction site, its brash sounds
and fluorescent vest-wearing workers, on the other smooth, corporate steady-cam
shots in the show-home of an aspirational couple performing a fake narrative
for the camera.
Combining
'real time' and ‘edited time’ to increasingly conflate reality and image, Showhome asks if what we’re seeing
couldn’t just be another advertisement, where the border between what we see
and what we desire to see is perilously undefined.
Asta Meldal Lynge is a Danish
artist who lives in London, UK. She completed a BFA at Central Saint Martins,
University of the Arts London in 2012. Her work has been exhibited in
Copenhagen, Sydney, New York City, and throughout England. Along with a
selection of other recent graduates, Asta is part of the CSM Associate Studio
Programme, a three-year structured residency (2013-16). She will release the
artist book Real state with publishers Studio Operative, London, later this year. Asta’s
first solo show was at Luce Gallery in Turin, Italy in 2013, and this is her
first in France.
#2
Noémie Bablet – Shakkei, 15-22 mai 2015
photo credits : Romain Darnaud
‘Gardens are, by definition, hermetic spaces that are
closed to everything outside of them. Shakkei
is a landscaping technique that permits this ‘outside’ to enter the garden by
integrating natural scenery, monuments or any other environmental features into
the garden’s composition. Disrupting the points of reference between inside and
outside, the border disappears, at least optically. Hence, in Japanese, we no
longer speak of haikei (background),
but of shakkei (borrowed scenery).’ *
Shakkei is a curving of the threshold between order and
disorder. The garden, a metaphor for the human control of nature, is at once
undermined and epitomised by this technique. Shakkei is the movement that seeks to bring the outside in; the
garden itself becomes defined by its ‘other’. The need to control thresholds is
momentarily disturbed by the confounding of what is seen as external (disorder)
and what is seen as internal (order) through the notion of ‘borrowing’. Here,
in a sense, one must renounce the idea of ownership; the garden and surrounding
landscape alike require us to let the outside (disorder) define us; a view
borrowed from somewhere else changes our own.
To conceive of any thing, we try to hold its limits in
our mind; we learn to think there is an end point, where it stops and something
else begins. The garden has a fence;
the person has skin; the box has a lid; the image has a frame. These limits are
reinforced by language, but they are more precisely described by the ideology
that things are primarily the products of human decisions towards matter.
Hence, the interpretation of art and other material cultures through the lens
of intention: it is the individual artist’s will, combined with inert matter,
which produces the work of art. Things are put in place to secure a firm
anthropo-grip on the world. The assumption goes that humans possess agency,
whereas matter does not, it only comes into being thanks to human touch. But
this formulation forgets that we live in a world of life, that the human touch
has no limits, for it does not exist per
se. The human touch is germs and fingernails, skin falling away and dust
collected, the condensation from the drink you last held, a blade of grass; it
is always affected by others.
Noémie Bablet’s work in installation, video,
photography, drawing and textiles is interested in thresholds, covers, layers,
privacy and ‘following’, in the sense described by anthropologist Timothy
Ingold in his essay ‘The textility of making’. Unreservedly against the
interpretation of art based on cause and effect, which takes a given outcome
and reads backwards to the point of the agent’s novel idea, Ingold writes:
‘A work of art … is not an object
but a thing and … the role of the artist—as that of any skilled practitioner—is
not to give effect to a preconceived idea, novel or not, but to join with and
follow the forces and flows of material that bring the form of the work into
being. The work invites the viewer to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to
look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an
originating intention of which it is the final product.’ **
* Emmanuel Marès, ‘Shakkei’, Vocabulaire de la spatialité japonaise
(eds. P. Bonnin,
Inaga S., Nishida M.), CNRS Editions, Paris 2014 (trad. E. Weber). Original: ‘Le jardin est,
par définition, un espace clos et hermétique à tout ce qui se trouve à
l’extérieur. Le shakkei est une technique paysagère qui permet de faire
rentrer cet « extérieur », c’est-à-dire d’intégrer un paysage
naturel, un monument ou tout autre élément environnant à l’intérieur de la
composition du jardin. On brouille les repères et ainsi la frontière disparaît,
au moins visuellement. En japonais, on ne parle plus alors de haikei (arrière-plan),
mais de shakkei, (emprunt de paysage).’
** Timothy
Ingold, ‘The textility of making’, Cambridge
Journal of Economics, Vol. 34, Issue 1, 2010, pp. 91–102
Born
in France in 1987, Noémie Bablet
received a Master of Arts from Université Paris 8 in 2011, and will graduate
from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy in 2015. Since 2012,
she has assisted the Franco-Moroccan artist Yto Barrada, in Tangier, New York
and Paris. Her research into the work of US-American artist Dike Blair resulted
in an interview titled ‘Privacy Lovers’ in 2014. This year, Noémie received a
Fondation de France grant to develop her practice at the Textile Arts Center in
Brooklyn, NY, USA. In July she will participate in Piccole Baie, an annual
residency organised by philosopher Federico Nicolao in Italy. Shakkei is her first solo exhibition in Paris.
#3
Elena Betros – The room limits established by us, 26-31 mai 2015
photo credits : Frieder Haller
‘The room limits established by us’ is a line taken
from Marguerite Duras’ Il dialogo di Roma
(1983). In Duras’ film, the ‘us’ in question is the man and woman whose dialogue
is the voiceover to a series of slow silent shots that pan through the city of
Rome and its environs. The woman says that Rome is like a room, and it is their
love that establishes its limits. However, as we move through the film, the
‘us’ becomes ambiguous, spanning time and coming to include stone statues,
historical figures and people moving through the city in the present day.
Duras’ film uses dialogue to describe what is
preserved with the room, that is, Rome, or the idea of Rome. She suggests that
this city can only exist as an image of thought, never thought itself, and by
extension, that the dialogue is what the film is ‘about’. What occurs outside
the frame (il dialogo) is thus
integral to how we view the recorded images. The room’s limits can also be seen
as a frame of film.
In Elena Betros’ two-channel video The room limits established by us,
dialogue itself is absent, though language remains crucial to how two bodies
behave for the camera, and in turn to the images that are produced. Filmed with
actor Peter Paltos in and around his apartment in Melbourne, this work
continues a series of videos the artist has made with her friend since 2013.
These works, shot primarily in interior spaces, explore the way bodies
‘perform’ for the camera when they are not ‘performing’. This latest video is
also influenced by another Duras film, India
Song (1975), where sequences of still postures directed towards the camera
outline a strange language only accessible through the lens.
The room
limits established by us describes an affective space, yet one where we feel
estranged from the most familiar, even from the domestic; where sentiments are
articulated without vocabulary, and the language of bodies is always at a
slight remove from pure communication. After a set of circumstances is set up,
one can only seek, as the conclusion of Il
dialogo di Roma suggests, ‘to film what’s there, what shows up, there,
before us.’
Lay on your right side (body directed towards camera)
with your legs outstretched. Have your right elbow bent with your cheek resting
on the palm of your hand. Place left arm casually over left side of your body.
Gaze is confident and seductively stares into lens.
Elena Betros is
based in Melbourne, Australia. She received a BFA (Honours) from the Victorian
College of the Arts, University of Melbourne in 2011. She has been exhibiting in the Melbourne
artist-run scene since 2009, and currently works from Elizabeth Street Studios. In 2014, her solo show The performance of an act by someone who could have done otherwise
was held at West Space, and in 2013 she was included in the group show BACKFLIP: Feminism and Humour in
Contemporary Art at Margaret Lawrence Galley. Last year, Elena received an
Australia Council of the Arts ‘New Work’ grant to explore the relationship
between performance and the camera, notably at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want
To Be Part Of Your Revolution, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. This ongoing
research informs the present exhibition, Elena’s first outside Melbourne.
#4
Nuno da Luz – with Assisted Resonance, 18-21 juin 2015
video credit: Ana Vaz
‘Tone-of-place,
experienced, heard through skin, detected by unnamed sensibilities, and
impression carried-in through skin even when not in the physical place. Tone
around you and with you. “I don’t like your tone,” “I like your tone,” “I like
the tone of this place.”’
Nuno
da Luz’s work is in the tone of accompaniment. The sounds he records and
performs accompany a place; the places he inhabits are accompanied by sounds.
Incommensurable sound-places come to mutually describe through the decision to
associate them at a given moment, but this association can be reconfigured:
accompaniment presumes reinterpretation.
For
this event, wind and water as heard on beaches in Portugal, forests in Germany,
plateaus in New Mexico, and volcanoes in Iceland and Stromboli will be played
‘with assisted resonance’ provided by the real-time ambient sound from the
river Seine's waterfront. Feedback loops resounding across two studios at the
Cité internationale des Arts enhance the sense of sonic and spatial
intercession.
The
tone of accompaniment always invites others – other places, other people, other
sounds, other vibrations. Da Luz’s choice to quote US-American composer
Maryanne Amacher’s words to explain with
Assisted Resonance, echoes the acknowledgment implicit in the work’s title
that nothing – no sound, no action, no tone, no place – is heard alone.
Nuno da Luz was born in
1984 in Lisbon, Portugal. Artist and publisher, his work circumscribes the
aural and the visual in the form of sound events, installations and printed
matter. The latter are mostly distributed through ATLAS
Projectos, the publisher he co-runs with
artists André Romão and Gonçalo Sena. In addition, he runs the record label Palmario
Recordings with artist Joana Escoval.
Nuno has exhibited and performed extensively in Portugal and Germany, and in
2014 he undertook a residency in New York City. This year he completed the
Masters program Experimentation in Art and Politics at Sciences Po, in Paris,
France, where he is in residence at the Cité internationale des Arts through October.
#5
Signe Frederiksen – Les Insoumuses, 28 juin 2015
photo credits : Signe Frederiksen
Les
Insoumuses is the title of a project
based on several conversations conducted by
artist Signe Frederiksen in 2015 with female artists, writers and curators –
friends and acquaintances – in Paris and Copenhagen. The voices and sentiments
of these conversations have been transcribed, edited and recombined into a
screenplay for three anonymous characters, and will be performed as a play for
small audiences by actors Pedro Gomes,
Julia Perazzini and Anne Steffens.
Largely derived from recordings
or notes, Frederiksen mixes multiple voices and thoughts, both her own and
others, into a script where the identity of the person making the original
enunciation is not explicit, nor particularly important. By engaging three
actors to perform this imaginary but utterly plausible conversation in a
realistic manner and context (a studio at the Cité internationale des Arts),
Frederiksen highlights the shared experience of cultural workers – with a
particular emphasis on gendered experience – rather than promoting the exceptionality
of particular individuals. Her own authorial voice, if she has one, swirls
among the voices of others past and present, with whom she shares life.
This new work relates to
research Frederiksen has been undertaking into French militant feminist video
of the 1960s and ‘70s, notably by way of the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir in Paris. One of the feminist
video collectives, called Les Femmes
s’amusent (Women Having Fun), later renamed themselves Les Insoumuses. This group, comprising members Nadja Ringart,
Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig and Ioana Wieder, created some of the most
significant activist videotapes of the time, along with other collectives such
as Videa. Some of these videos document feminist demonstrations in Paris, and slogans
from their banners appear in verbal form in Frederiksen’s piece, in a moment of
disjunction between current and past events.
The name ‘Insoumuses’ was a
neologism combining ‘insoumise’, which translates as ‘disobedient [female]’,
and ‘muses’, a word sharing the same signification in French and English and
customarily thought of as referring to a female personification of artistic
inspiration. Frederiksen is interested in how the arrival and accessibility of
new portable camera technology invited the creation of a new kind of language
for militant feminists, a new way of describing and producing one’s image and
one’s politics that had no precedent and did not – at least initially – rely on
previously established standards of value, whether artistic, visual, economic
or journalistic.
Les
Insoumuses puts forth a language that
includes uncertainty, discussion, several opinions – an every-day language, an
intimate language – in a closed but public forum. Exploring conversational
language and its processes of formalisation and disintegration, ultimately the
project asks the question of itself: How to find strategies for working that
can escape the power structures of the art-world? How to create a space for
thinking and creation that does not necessarily affirm the language and
standards of this system?
Born in 1987, Signe Frederiksen is a Danish artist
who lives in Paris, France. She graduated in 2013 with an MFA from the Royal
Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna,
Austria (2011-12). During 2014 she was part of the Paris-based collective castillo/corrales,
and has continued to work as an assistant to the Swedish artist Joachim Hamou.
This is the first presentation of Signe’s work in France.