Béatrice Balcou: L’économie des apostrophes

For her first major exhibition in France Béatrice Balcou takes a personal look at the importance of discretion, care-giving and mediation.

In performances, sculptures, drawings and installations she offers innovative exhibition rituals in the form of artistic experiences at once sensory and emotional. Her orchestration of new and different relationships between art, work and rest blurs the conventional distinctions between production, distribution and consumption. Her artistic stance is atypical: addressing creations that are not her own, replicating them and playing the role of technician or artworks registrar, she radically challenges our relationship with the work involved in making art and its value. For her the artwork is not an ephemeral image to be rapidly identified or consumed, but rather a physical entity to be cared for and to spend time with as a group. What is essential for her is the way we look at things and what we make of the results.

Trained in the visual arts, dance, the martial arts and the tea ceremony, she brings her skills together in a form of gestural exploration. While for Balcou gesture embodies the importance of touch and movement, it is also, as Giorgio Agamben has written, “the other side of the merchandise.” Here the exhibition room becomes a locus for resistance to touristic consumption of cultural goods.

Following her presentation of Untitled Ceremony #10 at La Ferme du Buisson in 2017, Balcou is back with a mix of works old and new. In the vein of her recent Pièces Assistantes [Assistance Pieces] she undertakes a meditation on vulnerability as strength and an exploration of withdrawal, discretion and silence as factors in the definition and the core role of mediation. In this near-retrospective she amalgamates work past, recent and in progress, with the accent on mutual aid and cooperation. The exhibition we are invited to is an evolving landscape in which a host of relationships take shape as we move through arrangements of placebo sculptures, a filmed ceremony, hitherto unshown drawings, works we can actually handle and input from mediators. These spatial and temporal settings invite us to live with the works, contemplate them, take them in our hands, comprehend them and become attached to them—and to take the time to become a spectator.
 

in partnership with Villa Kujoyama - Kyoto and MAC VAL, Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum / with the support of Flanders State of the Art

Related program

Performance Untitled Ceremony #14
December 2, 2018
Admission free, booking: reservation [​at​] macval.fr 
MAC VAL, Val-de-Marne Contemporary Art Museum 

Discussion Béatrice Balcou and sociologist Yaël Kreplak
December 8, 2018
+ launch of Digressions #6 

Performance Untitled Ceremony #14
February 9, 2019
Admission free