Pauline Julier: Naturalis Historia / Barbezat-Villetard: Like Ripples on a Blank Shore / Mathis Gasser: Le musée et la planète

Pauline Julier: Naturalis Historia
Opening: Friday, September 8, 6–9pm

The Centre culturel suisse is pleased to present for the first time in France Naturalis Historia, an installation by Pauline Julier that mounts several nature stories thanks to a number of sound and visual devices. Each story explores a situation where men are grappling with nature, which points up their obsessions and shakes their certainties to the core.

Rather like an essay, the show exists at the crossroads of the personal point of view and the documentary study, adopting a kaleidoscopic form. It lays out the narratives, traces and gathered objects to form different layers in what could be seen as an excerpt from a personal encyclopedia—contemporary and visual.

“Naturalis Historia defends the idea that humans, seeking to shape a raw, changing world, confine it with their categories of thought, which lend it a certain stability. I want to stress how much the concepts that are used to organize the diversity of the world are our own; we produce them and with them the risk of emptying the world of its essence by freezing it in a catalogue of images, landscapes, definitions, and resolutions (scientific, religious, etc.) It is the same movement as that of the volcano that snuffs out life by freezing a forest or city in place. The same drive as that of the photographic image which slices up the “real” and thus plays a part in holding in place a world to be seen and understood. It is the same illusion of the continuity of movement produced by the film image. The world is emptied of its raw vitality and organized according to representational codes that are inevitably anthropized.” Pauline Julier

With the participation of Philippe Descola, the anthropologist and chair of anthropology at the Collège de France, Paris; Bruno Latour, the philosopher, anthropologist, professor at Sciences Po, director of the medialab, and founder of SPEAP (program of experimentation in the arts and politics), Paris; and the paleobiologist Professor Wang, Research Professor of Palaeobotany, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.  

The show was coproduced with La Ferme Asile in Sion and enjoys the generous support of the Contemporary Art Fund of the City of Geneva; the Cantonal Contemporary Art Fund Geneva; the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (France); HEAD, the Haute Ecole d’Art et de Design of Geneva; and the Département Cinéma / cinéma du réel.

Pauline Julier (1981, lives and works in Geneva) is an artist and filmmaker who studied at the École Supérieure de la Photographie of Arles and Science Po, Paris. Her films have been screened at the Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, the Hors Pistes Festival at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Loop Festival in Barcelona, the Visions du réel Festival in Nyon, the Tokyo Wonder Site, the Gaité Lyrique in Paris, the Internationale Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen, and the Istanbul Biennial.

Her work has been featured in numerous shows, notably at the Ferme-Asile, Sion (2017); Reset Modernity, ZKM, Karlsruhe (2016); Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Centre d’art contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; and Arthub, Shanghai (2014–15).

Barbezat-Villetard: Like Ripples on a Blank Shore
Opening: Friday, September 8, 6–9pm

The Franco-Swiss art duo Barbezat-Villetard, (Matthieu Barbezat, Nyon, 1981, and Camille Villetard, Paris, 1987) work with space, the status of architectural elements and objects in order to reveal/conceal a territory that lies at the limit of the unreal.

For both the CCS courtyard and the gallery on the courtyard, the two artists have dreamed up Like Ripples on a Blank Shore. A group of discontinuous columns and a horizontal ray of light generate a relationship between the inside and the outside, fashioning an ambiguous architecture that is both structuring and loose. With their ambivalent functions, the forms making up the installation create an atmosphere that is imbued with a provisional character.

Matthieu Barbezat was born in 1981 in Nyon (Switzerland) and Camille Villetard in 1987 in Paris. Together they live and work between Bern and Paris. They are graduates respectively of the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) and the Ecole cantonale d’art of Valais (ECAV). Their most recent solo shows have been held at the GSN Project, Moncton, Canada; WinOrLoseLA, Los Angeles, USA; ZQM, Berlin, Germany; Musée d’art du Valais, Sion, Switzerland; and Lokal-int, Bienne, Switzerland. They are recipients of the main Aeschlimann-Corti grant for 2016, and the 2015 Manor Sion Culture Prize. Following their residency at the Cité internationale des Arts of Paris, which they have only just completed, Barbezat-Villetard will be pursuing two additional residency projects next winter in Seoul and Tokyo.

Mathis Gasser: Le musée et la planète (The museum and the planet)
Opening: Friday, October 27, 6–9pm

Mathis Gasser (1984, Zurich, lives and works in London) collects, arranges, pastes up or reproduces images of all kinds and genres that come from a wide range of sources. Flouting all hierarchies, he mixes art history, architecture, cinema, television, advertising, video games, detective novel, comics and graphic novels, and science fiction. Gasser lends images a deep influence on the subconscious and those he creates also convey a critical view of the excesses of the globalized capitalist system. The collages and sculptures on display in the courtyard gallery superimpose past, present, and future, playing with formal and architectural similarities, notably between sites that embody power and sci-fi imagery.

During the show opening, there will be a screening at 8:30pm of In the Museum 3 (2015–17, 23 minutes), a film featuring a Christopher Walken puppet battling zombies in the galleries of a museum.

Mathis Gasser (born in 1984 in Zurich, lives and works in London) studied at HEAD in Geneva, the Tokyo Institute of Art and Design, and the Royal College of Art in London. He has recently shown his work at the Kunsthaus in Glarus, the Kunsthalle in Bern, and the Centre d’édition contemporaine and chez ribordy contemporary in Geneva. He was a resident of Fri-Art, Fribourg in 2014 and has been the recipient of several prizes, the George Foundation Prize, Zurich; the Roldenfund, Basel; and the Hine Award of the Royal College of Art, London.