Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Les EnvoûtésExhibition of the winners of the 1% marché de l'art Award

Freely inspired by Witold Gombrowicz’s novel of the same name, this exhibition brings together five artists whose projects were chosen and then created in the context of the second edition of the 1% Marché de l’Art Prize awarded to visual artists.

The novel Les Envoûtés (Opętani ), written in 1939, published in 1973 and in its entirety in 1990, describes the experiences of a group of characters in a strange 170-room chateau whose vast collection of art treasures is yet to be inventoried. Like its author, this curious literary item —a mixture of fantasy, gothic and crime fiction—has become something of a cult favourite; it remains uncategorisable and portrays a world like no other. The same is true of each of the five artists chosen for the quality of their careers so far and the relevance of the works they wished to create: all the works on exhibit are fragments of a world that is both our own and metaphorical, whose rules they have re-invented before immersing us in them. In a post-Covid context where all of us have experienced the world’s permeability and the body’s fragility, these five “possessed” individuals testify to the resilience of creative thought. They invite us to lose our bearings in as many mental and visual worlds and journeys in space and time, between East and West, macrocosm and microcosm.

 

Clarisse Hahn – Princes de la rue

Clarisse Hahn’s series Princes de la rue combines archive images—documenting “Algeria’s love-hate relationship with  France” over the last century—and portraits of cigarette sellers taken by the artist beneath the Barbès-Rochechouart aerial metro station. Warriors in an invisible everyday war, under her lens, these men living on the edge appear both brave and vulnerable. “With an elegance unique to the eastern body, they manage to assert their presence in this area: the street is theirs, they are its princes despite all the humiliation that comes with each passing day, standing tall like victorious warriors.”

Born in 1973, artist and filmmaker Clarisse Hahn examines the codes connected with “being together”, not just by reporting on the communities whose rituals she deconstructs, but by upending the relationship between the watched and the watcher. She examines the intimate social aspects of the body, intervening to disrupt its representations, testing out each individual’s limitations while establishing affective relationships with her protagonists. Clarisse Hahn graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris and has a Master’s in Art History from the Sorbonne. Among other venues, her work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the Jousse Entreprise Gallery and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, MAMCO Geneva, the Reina Sofía Museum and Art Centre in Madrid and the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

 

Kubra Khademi – Pouvoir et destruction

In the 15 drawings composing Pouvoir et destruction, Kubra Khademi evokes a utopian matriarchy as pictured in Afghan mythology, populated with sexually liberated warrior goddesses. Such tales, orally transmitted in secret by her illiterate mother and grandmother, were in marked contrast to the place assigned to women in Afghanistan, a reality that the artist made her escape from. In brief, the artist’s seemingly paradoxical procedure consists of drawing these powerful women, exhibiting them and then destroying them during performances. “By voluntarily destroying these drawings, even though I do so in places that offer hope to an artist like myself, I put myself in a position where I assume power by destroying the materiality of my artworks, which should exist beyond the act of creation. In fact, by destroying them, making them disappear, I increase their visibility.”

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1989, Kubra Khademi is a performance artist and visual artist. Following her street performance “Armor” in 2015, a protest against a patriarchal society staged in the centre of Kabul, she fled her country for France. She studied at Kabul’s School of Fine Arts before attending Beaconhouse University in Lahore (Pakistan). In 2016, the artist was awarded the title of Knight Of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Ministry of Culture. Kubra Khademi has been a member of the Atelier des Artistes en Exil (Agency of Artists in Exile) in Paris since 2017 and was resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts from 2017 to 2019. In 2019, the artist was selected for the Révélations Emerige Grant and obtained a year’s residency at the Fiminco Foundation.

 

Jean-Charles de Quillacq – Getting a Younger Sister, Thinking to Myself

Beyond male and female, Jean-Charles de Quillacq’s universe is based on sameness and “substitutability”: an individual can take another’s place without causing any significant change in the course of events. In particular, the artist plays with his body and his resemblance to his brothers and sisters, whose faces he reproduces and makes into masks he wears in a film, one after the other, like so many living variations of a self-portrait and of semi-othernesses. The title of the film, Getting a Younger Sister, Thinking to Myself which emphasises the artist’s familiarity with his objects, develops another kind of indistinction, this time between desire and labour, between labour of desire and labour of production. Rather than being identifiable to its products, labour thus becomes understandable with regard to what it is on its own : a production and a practice of one’s self.

Jean-Charles de Quillacq (1979) studied at the Beaux-Arts de Lyon, the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. He creates groups of sculptures that are both conceptual and fetishistic and which invest the economy of desire and market relations. Obliged to work in order to ensure his (re)-production, the artist engages his own person, splits himself up into objectified

alterities, breaks himself down into isolated limbs and manufactures his presence—whether joyful or sorrowful—under the eyes of his audience. He has recently had two solo exhibitions, Ma système reproductive and Ma sis t’aime reproductive, held respectively at Bétonsalon (2019) and Art3 Valence (2021).

 

Louis-Cyprien Rials – Drop Tank

“Take an object that seems simple enough at first sight and discover its less dark, less documented aspects”: such is the idea behind Louis-Cyprien Rials’ Drop Tank, a story of their subject’s use in Laos. These auxiliary fuel tanks attached to the undersides of aircraft were single-use items and were often jettisoned over areas whose populations were victims of bombing missions. Reused for recreational purposes in the West, in particular in order to create “belly-tank lakester” racing cars in the United States, thousands of them were locally jettisoned during the Vietnam war. Along the Ho-Chi-Minh Trail, villagers took to reusing this essential metal, mainly to make boats for subsistence fishing, “so converting an instrument designed to extend death’s domain into a wounded people’s unforeseen means of survival.”

Born in 1981, Louis-Cyprien Rials developed his skills as a photographer in Japan. Back in Europe, he lives and works between Paris and Berlin, while continuing his travels to countries and areas forbidden to the public at large: Eastern Europe, Chernobyl, the former Yugoslavia, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Iraq, Armenia and Crimean, which he sees as “involuntary nature parks”. His work focuses on the link between landscape and conflict, through photographs, videos, ceramics and sculptures. He was among the artists nominated for the 2016 Révélations Emerige Grant. In 2017, he was awarded the SAM Contemporary Art Prize for his project in Uganda, which he exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in 2019.

 

Louidgi Beltrame - Symbiotic consciousness

Symbiotic Consciousness is “a ‘sciencefiction’ film that explores the possibility of a consciousness extended to ‘beings other than human’ and the ontological question of the gap between phenomena and things”. In it, Louidgi Beltrame  uperimposes two film montages in which archival footage and more recent images co-exist, with a sound composition by the Norwegian artist and composer Morten Norbye Halvorsen. On one side, the pre-Columbian solar observatory of Chankillo in Peru, filmed by the artist, alternates with views of the sun recorded by the NASA Space Telescope; on the other, rushes of the Tomba Brion —a mausoleum designed by the architect Carlo Scarpa—dialogue with images created by cellular microscopy, showing the architecture of living cells. “So, the four regimes of images brought into play in the montages on the two screens used in Symbiotic Consciousness contaminate each other, challenging and combining with one another to generate perspectives and possibilities with regard to the critical questions of our world.”

Louidgi Beltrame was born in Marseille in 1971. His work focuses on documentation of modes of human organisation in the history of the twentieth century. He travels to sites defined by their paradigmatic relationship with modernity, including Hiroshima, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Chandigarh, Chernobyl and the Gunkanjima mining colony off the coast of Nagasaki. His films—which are based on recordings of reality and constitution of archives—use fiction as a possible way of considering history. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at such venues as MAC Lima in 2021, CAC Passerelle in 2018, Palais de Tokyo in 2015, Kunstverein in Langenhagen in 2015, the Jousse Entreprise gallery and the Ricard Corporate Foundation in 2010, CAC Les Eglises in Chelles in 2010, and Jeu de Paume in 2006.

 

 

Présentation du Prix 1% marché de l’art

 

Les Envoûtés is an exhibition of winning works from the second edition of the 1% Marché de l’Art Prize. This scheme in support of artistic creation, targeting artists working in the field of visual arts and run by the City of Paris and Crédit Municipal de Paris, was inaugurated in October 2018 on the occasion of the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC). A sum of up to €20,000 is allocated to each winner. Crédit Municipal de Paris

finances these grants by deducting 1% of the sales revenues made at its 80 annual auctions. The Jury for the second edition of the Prize was chaired by Fabrice Hergott, director of Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, and also included Corinne Diserens, director of the Beaux- Arts de Paris-Cergy, Rebecca Lamarche- Vadel, director of Lafayette Anticipations, and Camille Morineau, director of AWARE (Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions).