Spring 2015 exhibitions
March 14–June 7, 2015
Opening: Saturday, March 14, 6:30pm
Musée régional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussillon
146 Avenue de la Plage
34 410 Sérignan
France
T +33 4 67 32 33 05
museedartcontemporain [at] cr-languedocroussillon.fr
Pierre Leguillon
The museum of mistakes: Barnum
The museum of mistakes: Barnum, presented in the Mrac from 15 March to 7 June 2015, follows The Museum of Mistakes: Contemporary Art and Class Struggle presented at Wiels in Brussels from 10 January to 22 February. Under this shared name, a set of photographs, film extracts, ads, postcards, posters, slides, disc sleeves, magazines and other mass media are assembled in the form of unique works.
Conceived by Pierre Leguillon, this Museum brings together works created over the course of the last 15 years and is articulated under the sign of Barnum. Phineas Taylor Barnum was an American entertainment showman, famous for his freak shows and for the Barnum Circus founded in 1871, which gave birth to its Big Top namesake. Barnum will remain known in history for the excessive nature of his shows, the strangeness of the phenomena being paraded and his talent for advertising through methods and staging which were sometimes dubious but very innovative for the time. Placing the Museum of mistakes under the sign of Barnum is a way to query the genealogy of the images from the angle of the entertainment so dear to our contemporary societies. It testifies to the interest that Leguillon brings to the contextualisation of images, as well as to the manner in which their conditions of appearance shape their reception.
His Museum of mistakes invites us to use the archives at our disposal to re-write history, our history. By opening up identities, whether that of the artist, the visitor or the images exhibited, the Museum of mistakes invites us to rethink our conditions for the reception of art which here is not only envisaged as an object, but also as one human activity among others. Thus, Leguillon questions the political function of art in a society where each individual is constantly receiving and emitting information.
The Museum of mistakes is a coproduction Mrac/Wiels from an initiative of Wiels.
Éléonore False
Il suffit de son bras soulevé pour arrêter et faire reculer le soleil
(It’s enough to raise his arms to try to stop and push the sun back)
Starting from fragments of images carefully collected during her reading, Éléonore False creates a repertoire of forms and gestures to which she applies a whole set of procedures (magnification, cut-out, hollowing-out, incisions, repetitions) that the artist envisages in a sculptural rapport with the space in which these images come to find a new configuration.
Her interest focuses on the representations of the body whether their origins are for example from dance, from the history of art or from medical books.
Roven Platform
Rituals, repetitions, constraints, temptations
Today drawing occupies a significant place in the landscape of international contemporary art. In this context, the Cabinet d’arts graphiques will echo these researches by inviting the Roven curatorial platform for an exhibition around the rituals of drawing.
To discuss ritual in the practice of drawing is to speak of a structure in time and space from which energy emanates. The drawing then becomes a substance that makes a reality, embodies, gives life or even assigns living qualities to an inanimate object or a belief.
With works by: Ignasi Aballí, Irma Blank, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Pierre Buraglio, Claude Cattelain, Hanne Darboven, dessins tantriques, Otelo Fabião, Carla Filipe, Henri Jacobs, Julije Knifer, Wolfgang Laib, Alexandre Léger, Anna Maria Maiolino, Alison Moffett, Caroline Muheim, Matt Mullican, Morgan O’Hara, João Onofre, Elisa Pône, Laure Prouvost, Reto Pulfer, Marcel van Eeden, Didier Rittener, Nil Yalter
Portrait of the artist as a young man
New display of the collection
The exhibition Portrait of the artist as a young man is inspired very freely by the novel of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce in which the writer tells us about his liberation via artistic vocation. For this new seasonal display, which combines new acquisitions and older pieces from the collection, the exhibition will propose a permanent back and forth trip between the real and the imaginary, between the world and its poetic reinvention, between a world travelled and a world dreamed of.
Curator: Sandra Patron
Coming up
June 27–August 30
Mariana Castillo Deball
Francisco Tropa
Roven Platform: Reto Pulfer
Project Room: Hicham Berrada
Press contact: Sylvie Caumet
caumet.sylvie [at] cr-languedocroussillon.fr / T +33 6 80 65 59 67
The Mrac is run by the Region Languedoc-Roussillon and supported by the Ministery of Culture and Communication/ DRAC Languedoc-Roussillon.
