Doppelgänger 2/3
With Cécile Dauchez, Lisa Holzer, David Jourdan, Ciara Phillips, Nagisa Oshima, Denis Prisset, Chloé Quenum, Markus Schinwald, Westphalie, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
February 9–May 19, 2013
Opening: Friday, February 8
Performance for the opening: Lisa Holzer, David Jourdan, Westphalie,
Bread-and-Butter, Ditsies and Dumb-Dumbs
CEAAC
7, rue de l’Abreuvoir
F-67 000 Strasbourg, France
T +33 (0)3-88-25-69-70
info [at] ceaac.org
Curated by Vincent Romagny
The second segment of the Doppelgänger cycle, the exhibition The Souls, a Twice-Told Tale will pursue its exploration of the forms taken by splitting and doubling up in the work of artists employing different media. Where the exhibition The Separate addressed the issue of division, with the individual’s psychic structure as the “theatre of operations,” this second group of works considers the matter from the point of view of “shared living.”
The title is borrowed from The Souls of Black Folk, the collection of writings by the African-American sociologist and activist W.E.B. Dubois (1868–1963). The exhibition will play on the veiling/unveiling structure Dubois used in his analysis of the moral and metaphysical devastation wrought by segregation: for the victims of the inequality segregation imposed, the impossibility of actually splitting the self was exacerbated by the fact of second-class citizenship. But while Dubois set out to describe the effects of the invisible veil, the exhibition, through its actual layout, will exemplify the situation’s structural principles.
This will entail reiterating—stating once again, but in another way—a paradoxical involvement with the world; and doing so via juggling with the conventions of language and custom (Lisa Holzer, David Jourdan, Westphalie) or on the most unremarkable everyday objects (Chloé Quenum). Paradoxical because inseparable from a detachment (from that same world) in terms of its formal interplay (Ciara Phillips) or from the issue of representation and remembrance (Denis Prisset). At the same time, while the exhibition does not have a strictly post-colonial focus, it cannot neglect the issue either, if only because it borrows from the issue’s form. The works by Markus Schinwald and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, together with Nagisa Oshima’s film Three Resurrected Drunkards (Cinema Star, April 4th), confront the question of stereotyping directly, sometimes by standing it on its head.
The CEAAC is funded by Région Alsace, Conseil Général du Bas-Rhin, Ville de Strasbourg and DRAC Alsace. Thanks to Ecole Supérieure d’Art de la Réunion.
