Esther Shalev-Gerz, Lisette Model and Mathilde Rosier
9 February – 6 June 2010
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
Ton image me regarde !?
Esther Shalev-Gerz was born in Vilnius, raised in Israel and has lived in Paris since 1984. She is internationally recognised for her seminal investigation into the nature of democracy, citizenship, cultural memory and spatial politics.
Her works challenge the notion and practice of portraiture, which she regards as a possible reflection of a person, place or event that is, in itself, never stable or definitive. In her works, the Other appears as a counterpart, someone with and through whom a process of complicity occurs. Her installations, photographs, videos and interventions in public space are developed through active dialogue, consultation and negotiation with people whose participation puts the emphasis on their individual and collective memories, their words, silences and experiences.
Constantly inquiring into transitional qualities of time and space and the correlative transformation of identities, locales and (hi)stories, Esther Shalev-Gerz has produced a body of work that simultaneously records, critiques and contributes to our understanding of the societal roles and value of artistic practice.
This monographic exhibition features works like Monument Against Fascism, 1986-1993; Perpetuum Mobile, 1998-2000; White Out-Between Telling and Listening, 2002; MenschenDinge / The Human Aspect of Objects, 2004-2006, and Sound Machine, 2008.
The exhibition reveals how the artist has developed strategies by which the contextual bias of her individual works may become collectively representative of the idea of dialogue. This has led to the remaking of particular works, among which a new version of Inseparable Angels 10- a clock with two faces with hands moving in opposite directions that remains elemental to her works and derives from her Work The Imaginary House of Walter Benjamin, first shown in 2000. Inseperable Angels 10, 2000-2010 has been realized and produced by the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre. Esther Shalev-Gerz’s has also produced a new installation D’eux / On Two, 2009, specially commissioned by the Jeu de Paume for this occasion.
Curator: Marta Gili
Exhibition organized with the support of the Manufacture Jaeger-LeCoultre
Exhibition Catalogue: Esther Shalev-Gerz, texts by Jacques Rancière, Lisa Le Feuvre and Stefanie Baumann. Edited by Fage & Jeu de Paume, 2009, bilingual, 160 pages.
Lisette Model
If Lisette Model took up photography as a way of earning a living, it is also true that she always fought for her own subjects, rather than simply carry out the assignments given by editors. She believed that for a photograph to be successful, its subject had to be something that “hits you in the stomach.” For Model, the camera was an instrument for probing the world, a way of capturing aspects of a permanently changing reality that otherwise we would fail to see.
She always said that she looked but did not judge. Yes, her photographs of the Promenade des Anglais in Nice were published by the left-wing journal Regards, in 1935, but she was not interested exclusively either in the rich or in the poor, and her images are much more about human relations. Her work evinces empathy, curiosity, compassion and admiration, and reflects the photographer’s attraction to voluminous forms, energy and liveliness, to emphatic gesture and expression: the world as stage. The critic Elizabeth McCausland has described Model’s camerawork as expressing “a subconscious revolt against the rules.”
This exhibition of some 120 of Lisette Model’s most representative photographs illustrates the very bold and direct approach to reality that made her one of the most singular proponents of street photography, the particular form of documentary photography that developed in New York during the 1940s, through the camerawork of such as Helen Levitt, Roy de Carava and Weegee.
Curator: Cristina Zelich
Exhibition organized by Jeu de Paume and the Fundación MAPFRE
Exhibition Catalogue: Lisette Model – Ann Thomas Cristina Zelich – Edited by Fundación MAPFRE & Jeu De Paume, 232 pages.
Mathilde Rosier
Find circumstances in the antechamber
Mathilde Rosier makes artworks that are decidedly uncontemporary. Without resorting to nostalgia or passeism, they seem nevertheless out of time. They are also, one could say, out of place, exploring as they do the slippery border between theater and the real, nature and culture.
Extending her interest in the theatrical, Rosier constructs an elaborate, newly commissioned installation in three parts for the Jeu de Paume: including a film made in the countryside in which a theatrical stage is the backdrop, an exact reconstruction of the film stage in the Jeu de Paume, and various props from the film brought to the actual space of the exhibition.
Taking the viewer envers le décor, Rosier’s new film and its reconstructed elements compose a visual troubling between fact and fiction, inside and outside, the exhibition space and theater that leaves the visitor wondering whether the real can be located at all.
Curator: Elena Filipovic
Exhibition produced with the support of the Fondation Nationale des Arts Graphiques (FNAGP)
Exhibition Catalogue : Mathilde Rosier, Jeu de Paume edition, 2010, bilingual, 64 pages.
