Annette Messager
Casino
12 June - 6 November 2005
Official opening: 9 June at 5 p.m.
French Pavilion
Giardini della Biennale
Commissioners: Suzanne Pagé, Béatrice Parent
The French Pavilion is run by the French Association of artistic action in conjunction with the French ministry of culture and communication (Visual arts delegation / National center for visual arts), with the support of LVMH / Moët Hennessy . Louis Vuitton.
For the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Annette Messager has conceived a purpose-made project that occupies the entire location. Drawing her inspiration from a legendary Italian literary work featuring a now universal “hero”, she has designed a three-stage itinerary that evokes, allusively and poetically, a story about creation and filiation in art and, in a broader perspective, the destiny of man.
There is a tragic alternative in this game, where the immortality of a puppet would spell its innocence, whereas its restored humanity condemns it to death.
Right from the peristyle, the visitor is immersed in the work. Each room has its own particular rhythm that calls up a stage of the “hero’s” transformation in a precise sequence.
Between sleep and death, the visitor passes through a forest of bolsters dotted with various shapes and objects, with the puppet moving slowly in their midst. On entering the second room, the visitor is caught up in a fantastic, organic turbulence, the colour of which evokes the violence of creation and the passage into life. In the third room, a diabolical machine spurs the disarticulated hero into violent contortions. Suffering is there the suffering of the manipulator and the suffering of the manipulated. Is it a game or a nightmare? Pleasure or torture?
The “hero”, rebellious individuality and symbolic counterpart of the artist, acts out his life, falls to pieces and reconstructs himself again. Caught between the present and his desire for immortality, his very dislocation embodies the fear of a post-human era.
Duality is a leitmotif that has underpinned Annette Messager’s work from the outset. As both a woman and an artist, she has made a work of art of this status even as she manifests its tensions.
Annette Messager has always chosen to use ordinary, even derisory materials, pieced together in more or less sophisticated arrangements to invent a distinctive universe, between attraction and repulsion, drama and irony, evidence and ambiguity. She explores the realms of the commonplace and the day-to-day, platitudes and the unsaid, fears and fantasies. The evident intrepidness of the approach doesnt mask a secretly maintained vulnerability.
Over the last few years, her work has taken on far greater proportions in spatial terms
while acquiring a more solemn dimension as the artist responds to the violent upheavals of contemporary society. In recent works, a more introspective tone is mingled with public elements and the artist’s own personal history encounters history in a broader sense.
Espousing complete freedom, firmly established in the present, in continual renewal, playful and serious, Annette Messager’s work is rooted in an imagination and an unconscious that are as sophisticated as they are popular, calling up the many-sided, subterranean questionings that agitate society and consequently demanding a reading which is also multifaceted.
CATALOG
On the occasion of the Biennale, a book on Annette Messager’s work will be published, in English and French, by Editions Xavier Barral / Paris Musées.
SPONSORED BY : LVMH / Moët Hennessy . Louis Vuitton.
FRENCH AND INTERNATIONAL PRESS
Claudine Colin Communication
Nathalie Marchal
Telephone : 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01
nathalie@claudinecolin.com
INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
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Telephone 34 91 521 25 51
isaymo@yahoo.es
