Liliana Porter: Reality Play—From the 1960s to the Present Day / Tabita Rezaire: Fusion élémen.terre

Liliana Porter: Reality Play—From the 1960s to the Present Day
Les Abattoirs is proud to present the first retrospective in France of Liliana Porter (born in Argentina in 1941, living in New York since 1964). With some one hundred works on display, the exhibition takes the viewer on a voyage through her art. Gathering together past and recent works, it brings to the fore a new generation of female artists who have redefined the boundaries of conceptual art and transformed the poetic form of the installation.

Porter explores the potential of various media including printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography and video, in a long-term examination into our perception of reality and our notions of time and space. 

Printmaking is at the heart of her work, which she helped revive in the 1960s as part of the collective New York Graphic Workshop, co-founded with Luis Camnitzer and José Guillermo Castillo in 1964. This technique, which was rediscovered by Pop artists and championed in Central and South America for its political dimension, has allowed her to view the idea of authorship and collective work with a critical eye, as well as provide her with new narrative forms. 

In the 1970s she became interested in photography and began including images of her own body into drawings, in particular wall art, echoing concerns held by female artists at the time. 

The first half of the exhibition recounts this journey, while also offering a rereading of the historical, artistic and social context of the time, with regard to the commitment of Porter and the artistic community to which she belonged. 

The second half presents her installations, including two that have been especially created for Les Abattoirs. These small scenes have been present in her work for around twenty years and are created with contemporary figurines and knickknacks that she has found in flea markets during her travels. They also feature in her paintings and videos. 

By continuing her poetic exploration of reality, Liliana Porter upsets representational codes and challenges both the creative process and the surreal power of the image.

Tabita Rezaire: Fusion élémen.terre
For her first solo exhibition in France, the artist Tabita Rezaire (born in 1989, lives and works in Guyana, France) is presenting a body of work that combines new technology and ancestral rites. 

As an artist, farmer, yoga teacher and doula, Rezaire sees herself as the intercessor, providing us with other ways of accessing the world. Through her video installations, she reinvents contemporary technologies in light of ancestral sciences to rethink our relationship with the cosmos, by reoccupying our corporeal, secular and digital memory.

In the Post-Internet world, she imagines new connecting technologies by invoking natural elements, such as water, air and nourishing earth, as well as the healing arts. In her works, she appears as a digital incarnation of a cosmic being that plays with internet codes, combining digital, corporeal, scientific and spiritual realities with traditional knowledge as part of a post-colonial context. 

Recently she created the AMAKABA site in the Amazon rainforest in Guyana, designed to be a multifaceted space where the energy of the earth (through the cultivation of cocoa), the body (with doula support and yoga) and the sky (an observatory) come together, giving birth to new scenarios for being-in-the-world.

The exhibition presents the artist’s work through the three immersive installations created between 2017 and 2022. Conceived between past and future, each installation is a portal where the worlds of cyberspace, the living and the ancestors converge. Each is also a reflection on the coexistence between the human presence and the natural elements, through the successive exploration of stones, plants and water.

Rezaire has participated in many exhibitions, including at the Serpentine Gallery and the Hayward Gallery, London (2022); the Biennales of Sydney (2022) and Busan (2022); the Shanghai Biennale (2021); the Palais de Tokyo (2022) and the MoMA, New York (2018).

Curators: Annabelle Ténèze, Director / Lauriane Gricourt, Curator