Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster & Cie
Expodrome
until 6 May 2007
Open daily 10am-6pm, Wednesday 10am -10pm
closed Monday
This is ARC’s first major solo exhibition of the work of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In preference to the more conventional retrospective mode, the artist has opted for presenting an ensemble of works created in collaboration with an “exhibition team” her version of a film crew. Embodying the notions of “shared space” and “playground”, the exhibition puts the viewer at the heart of the set.
Since the early 1990s, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has been pursuing a thoroughly independent line, never hesitating to move beyond the art field, push back its frontiers and explore its relationship with such other domains as cinema, architecture, fashion, music and literature. She has built her oeuvre around “space”, beginning with the intimacy of Chambres and working through films and environments to her extreme urban situations and landscapes.
In ARC’s modernist architectural setting Expodrome brings together a number of “space-times” that trigger singular experiences: Solarium, La Fée Electricité, La Jetée, Promenade, Panorama, Cosmodrome and Cinéma.
These environments visual, sound-based, physical make up an exploratory journey “on the edge of the exhibition”. The exhibition is the medium for the artist: designing potential spaces and exploring limitations are ways of producing situations a little like staged scenes with which viewers can engage as they move through the exhibition.
The first such situation created with Nicolas Ghesquière is the environment/projection Solarium on the great staircase leading to the Salle Dufy.
Then, integrated into the exhibition, comes Dufy’s panoramic La Fée Électricité, accompanied by an instrumental montage by Alain Bashung.
On the ARC floor itself La Jetée, another joint creation with Nicolas Ghesquière, slows visitors’ progress down with an artificial landscape, an accumulation of sombre blocks and modules.
The large space opens out onto Promenade, created with Christophe Van Huffel: an invisible work whose cinema-inspired use of sound turns this into a radically tropicalised zone.
Panorama, created with Benoît Lalloz and Martial Galfione, presents, in the curved area, a contemporary version of 19th century panoramas, a luminously nocturnal vision of our planet’s great metropolises.
Tapis de lecture is an invitation to leaf through piles of paperbacks: these are the artist’s “reservoir of possibilities”, the source material for her fictions.
Next, an outdoor walkway takes the visitor into Cosmodrome (2001), a launch pad with sound by Jay-Jay Johanson.
Lastly, Cinéma is a selection of Gonzalez-Foerster’s films some made with Ange Leccia since 1996. Every Sunday at 3 pm a guest will offer a special cinema programme that ties in with the exhibition.
The written and visual collaborations making up the catalogue played a large part in the genesis of Expodrome. Among the contributors are Jean-Max Colard, Nicolas Ghesquière, Francesca Grassi, Lisette Lagnado, Ange Leccia, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Philippe Rahm and Angeline Scherf.
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has already shown several times at ARC, with Numéro Bleu (1991), L’hiver de l’amour (1994), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno (1998) and Voilà (2000); at many international biennials and film festivals; and more recently at the 27th São Paulo biennial (2006). She was invited at Documenta XI in Kassel (2002) and will be taking part in the next Skulptur Project in Münster this year.
Director of the Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris : Fabrice Hergott Head of ARC : Laurence Bossé
Curated by : Angeline Scherf with Emilie Renard
Contact Press & Communication : Héloïse Le Carvennec
heloise.lecarvennec@paris.fr / Tel. : 00 33 1 53 67 40 50
