Three exhibitions
Claude Cahun
Santu Mofokeng, Chasing Shadows
30 years of photographic essays
France Fiction: Billes-Club Concordance Accident
Until 25 September 2011
Jeu de Paume
1, Place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
www.jeudepaume.org
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The exhibition highlights both the diversity and the unity of the photographic work of Claude Cahun (1894–1954), bringing together a broad ensemble of her major works, some of which are little known or have seldom been exhibited.
Up to this day, Claude Cahun’s self-portraits have aroused the greatest interest among theoreticians of contemporary culture. By becoming at once both the object and the subject of her artistic experiments, the artist reinvented herself through photography. With an acute sense of “performance,” dressed as a woman or as a man, with her hair short, long or shaven, and with carefully chosen props (masks, capes, overgarments, glass balls, etc.), Claude Cahun used her own image to expose the clichés of feminine and masculine identity.
In the mid-1920s and throughout the 1930s Claude Cahun created photographs that involve the staging of objects, superposition of photos and photomontage. With this “theatre of objects” exploring visual and symbolic issues, she continued her speculations on self-metamorphosis.
Curators: François Leperlier and Juan Vicente Aliaga
Exhibition coproduced by Jeu de Paume, Paris, la Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona and The Art Institute of Chicago.
Santu Mofokeng, Chasing Shadows
30 years of photographic essays
This exhibition is the first retrospective in France of photographer Santu Mofokeng, well-known from his projects Black Photo Album/Look at me: 1890–1900s, Township Billboards: Beauty, sex and cell phones, Trauma Landscapes and Chasing Shadows.
His significant contribution to understanding and research on human development in South Africa, the outstanding quality and content of his work, his innovations in photographic representation, his acute insight into the symbolic meanings of landscape and into the reciprocal relations between environment and development, all make Santu Mofokeng a major South African artist.
Over 200 images (photographs and slide show) as well as texts and documents produced over the last thirty years offer a broad introduction to his work. The selection from the photographic essays affords insights into the Soweto of his youth, everyday life on farms and in townships, representations of the self and family histories of black South Africans, religious rituals and landscapes—including his most current project Radiant Landscapes, commissioned specially for this retrospective.
Curator: Corinne Diserens
The exhibition “Santu Mofokeng, chasseur d’ombres – 30 ans d’essais photographiques” is organised by Jeu de Paume, Paris, Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp, Kunsthalle Bern, and Bergen Kunsthall.
SANTU MOFOKENG at Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp: April–July 2012.
France Fiction: Billes-Club Concordance Accident
Jeu de Paume presents “Billes-Club Concordance Accident”, fourth show of the Satellite program curated by Raimundas Malašauskas.
The members of this Marble Club (Billes-Club) meet regularly to play throughout the duration of the exhibition. People willing to join the club can contact France Fiction (france.fiction@gmail.com) and buy a marble kit at the Jeu de Paume bookshop. The steel marbles designed by France Fiction for this game are all unique. Each piece is engraved with an expression or a word chosen by a founding member of the club: during the game, the combinations of engraved words illustrate the different degrees of significant or accidental harmony between the players.
In addition to playing marbles, France Fiction practice an itinerant poetic and scientific subjectivity, exploring the occult and melancholy dimensions of life. Founded in 2004, the group is a process of self-narration whose members go in for mystical meetings and encyclopaedic dissemination.
France Fiction is Stéphane Argillet, Marie Bonnet, Éric Camus, Lorenzo Cirrincione and Nicolas Nakamoto.
Curator: Raimundas Malašauskas
