Cosa Mentale / Kimsooja: To Breathe

Cosa Mentale
Imaginaries of Telepathy in the 20th-Century Art
Cosa Mentale is a unique exhibition that offers a re-reading of the history or art from 1990 to modern day by exploring artists’ fascination with the direct transmission of thought and emotion. It invites the spectator to relive one of the unexpected adventures of modernity: telepathic art in the 20th century. This exhibition traces a chronological path from symbolism to conceptual art with a collection of some one hundred works by major artists, ranging from Edvard Munch to Vassily Kandinsky, and from Joan Miró to Sigmar Polke. These artists provide innovative ways of communicating with spectators that take us beyond conventional linguistic codes.

The exhibition enables the spectator to understand how, throughout the 20th century, attempts to give material and visible form to thought processes coincide with the experiments of avant-garde artists. This fantasy of a direct projection of thought not only had a decisive impact on the birth of abstraction but also influenced surrealism and its obsession with the collective sharing of creation and, in the post war period, it gave rise to numerous visual and sound installations inspired by the revolution in information technology, leading to the declaration of “the dematerialisation of art” in conceptual practices.

The exhibition begins with the invention of the term “telepathy” in 1882, at a time when the study of psychology interacted with rapid developments in telecommunications. Endeavours ranged from the creation of “photographs of thought” in 1895 to the first “encephalograms” in 1924 (the year when the Surrealist Manifesto was published) and it was the actual activity of the brain which was to be shown in all its transparency, which encouraged artists to reject the conventions of representation by suppressing all restrictions of translation. Always present in the world of science fiction, it resurfaced in psychedelic and conceptual art in the period from 1960 to 1970 before reappearing today in contemporary practices enraptured by technologies of “shared knowledge” and the rapid development of neuroscience.

Curator: Pascal Rousseau, professor of contemporary history of art, University of Paris I – Panthéon Sorbonne

Kimsooja: To Breathe
For the French-Korean Year, Centre Pompidou Metz presents one of the most influential multi-disciplinary conceptual Korean artists of her generation: Kimsooja’s new installation To Breathe.

For this exhibition Kimsooja takes on the spaces of Centre Pompidou Metz’s ingenuous architecture to create a tri-dimensional tableau. Spanning the museum’s entrance, the 80 meters long Gallery 2 and the breadth of its two bay windows, the space of the museum’s gallery will find its utmost expression as a transient path: from the windows light is split, to be reflected on an almost liquid surface and reunited inside the projection of the artist’s video piece To Breathe: a series of digital monochromes accompanied by the sound of a chorus of the artist’s inhalation and exhalation.

To Breathe seeks to be the sum of the artist’s early meditation on painting, where the surface of the canvas is intuited to become a mirror that wraps identity, space and time; and where brushstrokes are destined to dematerialize into a splitting of light.

Still on view

Warhol Underground
Until November 23, 2015

Beacons
Until February 15, 2016

Opening hours
April 1–October 31: Monday, Wednesday–Thursday 10am–6pm, Friday–Sunday 10am7pm
November 1–March 31: Monday, Wednesday–Sunday 10am–6pm

Only 85 minutes via high-speed train from Paris.