Aurélien Froment
Fröbel Fröbeled
Grégory Castéra, Yaël Kreplak and Franck Leibovici
des récits ordinaires (Ordinary Tales)
Jean-Yves Jouannais
Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (How to Get a Dead Grandfather to Tell You About the Wars)
April 13–June 9, 2014
Villa Arson
National Contemporary Art Centre
20 avenue Stephen Liégeard
06105 Nice Cedex 2
France
Hours: Wednesday–Monday 2–6pm
Free admission
The Villa Arson feature simultaneously three exhibitions by artists who place orality and transmission at the heart of their practice, who link knowledge to art, and whose projects are conducted like a manner of research.
The first exhibition is the result of the work Aurélien Froment has been producing for the last ten years around Friedrich Fröbel, a German educator who invented the kindergarten in the 19th century, one of the first institutions dedicated to educating young children. The artist developed this work in particular during his two residencies at the Villa Arson in 2012 and 2013, which led to the creation of a series of photographs of Fröbel’s educational games. Bringing together images and objects in a single installation, Fröbel Fröbeled is a Fröbel-style exhibition on Fröbel, a Fröbelian exhibition of Fröbel’s work.
Des récits ordinaires (Ordinary Tales) is a proposition by Grégory Castéra (curator), Yaël Kreplak (researcher) and Franck Leibovici (poet and artist). Exploring the notion of an ecology of art, they have been interested in the various modes of existence of works of art. Starting from the idea that works of art also live through the stories that people tell about them, they attempt to show materially, in the guise of an exhibition designed like a training ground, the specific aspects that works of art take on in our ordinary conversations. A question remains unanswered: “what if in our conversations it were no longer us talking about a work of art, but rather the work of art itself who was beginning to act?”
With works by Ilana Salama Ortar, Stéphane Bérard, Christopher d’Arcangelo, Louise Bourgeois, Jana Sterbak, News Syndicate Company, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Erhard Walther, Aurélien Froment, Yves Klein, le Château de Versailles, Daniel Buren, and Pierre Huyghe. Evoked by Jean-Pierre Cometti, Stéphane Bérard, Pierre Bal-Blanc, Isabelle Alfonsi, Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin, Kobe Matthys pour Agence, Aurélien Mole, Ghislain Mollet-Viéville, Joceyln Wolff, Claire Le Restif, Benoît Dagron and Sandra Terdjman.
Lastly, Comment se faire raconter les guerres par un grand-père mort (How to Get a Dead Grandfather to Tell You About the Wars) attempts to reveal the sources and developments in the work that Jean-Yves Jouannais has been producing since 2008 on his Encyclopedia of Wars: through an ever-changing alphabet book, he tries to create the oral story of all the wars from the Iliad to the end of the second world war. The Encyclopedia of Wars is a literary creation born through quoting and collage, patching up, even inventing, without any notion of ever being published.
General curator: Eric Mangion
Fröbel Fröbeled is coproduced with the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Spike Island (Bristol), Frac Ile-de-France – Le Plateau (Paris), and the Heidelberger Kunstverein (Heidelberg). The exhibition is supported by the Institut Français and the Marcelle Alix gallery, Paris.
The project for Ordinary Tales is supported by the FNAGP (Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques).
Since their inception in 2008, all the sessions of the Encyclopedia of Wars have been held at the Centre Pompidou. The exhibition is produced with the support of the G-P. & N. Vallois gallery (Paris), in collaboration with France Culture.
To listen: the Atelier de Création Radiophonique of 2011/05/01 on France Culture, click here.
Villa Arson regroups a national advanced art school, a contemporary art centre, a artist-in-residency programe and a library.
Press contact: communication [at] villa-arson.org / T +33 (0) 4 92 07 73 91
