Will Benedict: Dialogue of the Dogs

The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève is proud to present Dialogue of the Dogs, the first major retrospective of Will Benedict’s work in Switzerland and one of his most ambitious exhibitions to date.

Will Benedict will use the institution’s two main floors to present both retrospective works and new productions in the form of paintings, videos, and installations. The artist’s chimeric imagery draws as much from the history of art and literature as from advertising and pop culture. The strange characters that populate his videos are human-animal hybrids, layering the complex psychic depiction of literary characters with the anthropomorphic oddities used to sell us sugary drinks. The result is a bizarre alternate reality where people have rooster crests, ears instead of eyes and buildings take the shape of elephants. Through humor and nonsense, he points to the world we have created and the absurdity on which we constantly feed.

The themes of delusion, perspective, and the satirization of power in Dialogue of the Dogs take their inspiration from “The Deceitful Marriage,” a story by the Spanish master Miguel de Cervantes. It tells of a sick man in hospital, feverish and delusional, who dreams of two dogs talking to each other. The dogs narrate their observations. They mock civilization—their masters are fools, brutal and corrupt. As roles are reversed and Cervantes gives the dogs the moral high ground, humanity becomes “dog-like.”

Will Benedict’s work does not seek answers but, on the contrary, asks many questions—about the problem of taking oneself seriously, the fallacy of moral hierarchies, the mess of being ethical, the problem of sincerity, and the value of stupidity. He portrays us as the animals we are but with the generosity of mutual implication.

Time as a concept also permeates almost all the works on view—from a polaroid in which we see a baby hatching from an egg, or an Uber driver trying to deliver food on time while hearing Pink Floyd’s eponymous song, to the omnipresent motif of a clock present in Cafe Wha?. As the artist states, “time holds everything together.”

This exhibition offers an opportunity not only to delve into Benedict’s imagery expressed through the moving image but also to see a large number of his paintings, photos, and collages assembled for the first time in one place. This work is consistent in tone with his videos and refers to the same dystopian world, looked at with a sense of irony; everywhere we seem to glimpse a hidden play, a double meaning, or an inside joke.

Will Benedict (b. 1978, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Paris. He has recently presented solo exhibitions at dépendance (Brussels), Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris), Fondazione Giuliani (Rome), Bergen Kunsthall, and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. Benedict was among the artists invited to participate in BIM’21 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève; the newly commissioned work he created together with Steffen Jørgensen, The Restaurant, Season 2, premiered in Geneva as part of the Biennale.

Dialogue of the Dogs is curated by Andrea Bellini. 

The Centre also presents dreamstime, Sarah Benslimane’s first institutional exhibition, in its Project Space

Sarah Benslimane (b. 1997) was born in France and lives and works in Geneva. She belongs to a generation of artists who live their lives completely within the rules of the Internet. Her work reflects the overflow of information, history, images and styles, available all at once and at everyone’s fingertips. Her sculptural paintings play tricks on the viewer’s expectations of reality, and seem to suggest clues in a puzzle that has exponentially grown out of control.

Her work has been shown at Cherish (Geneva), Friart (Fribourg), Tunnel Tunnel (Lausanne), and Karma International (Zurich).

dreamstime is curated by Fabrice Stroun and will feature a text by Mitchell Anderson.