ART CITIES:Paris-Ryan Gander
Ryan Gander is living and working in London and Suffolk, UK. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, his artworks materialise in many different forms: from sculpture to film, writing, graphic design, installation, performance and more. Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge, a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: gb agency Archive
Ryan Gander latest solo exhibition “Old Languages in very Modern Styles” is on presentation at gb agency in Paris. Ryan Gander wishes to create a dialogue between the viewer and the work, which have references to art history, cinematography and narrative structures. With his objects, installations, texts and films he invited visitors to establish their own connections, to make up their own stories and to generate individual meanings. Gander creates new meanings by bringing together various elements in a variety of combinations at different times within a new context. Gander’s works do not reveal their underlying stories in a recent interview Gander explained “If you let the spectator discover something on their own terms it holds more significance than it being handed on a plate”. An almost invisible work is the installation “I left my pride outside today” (2018) outside of the Gallery, described by the artist as “Discarded visitors’ stickers to a para-possible future fictional museum called ‘The Museum for the History of Presimulation’, left stuck to street furniture outside and around the door of the exhibition venue”. As the viewer enter the main space of the Gallery, at first he/she thinks it is empty, on a closer examination the work “2000 year collaboration (The Prophet)” (2018) is revealed. An animatronic mouse partially visible emerging from a hole broken through the gallery wall. The mouse delivers a 9 minute monologue using the voice of the artist’s 9 year old daughter, imparting a philosophical speech based on the final scene of “The Great Dictator”* (1940) directed, produced, scored by and starring by Charles Chaplin, rewritten from a post-simulacrum perspective. The installation “Equivalent Economies and Equivalent Means” (2018) is composed of a vending machine displaying a single bundle of 200 euros notes, totaling 10.000 euros. The remaining vending slots contain a variety of palm-sized, rounded stones found by the artist on a beach near his home. All items are available to purchase for 9.999,99 euros. Part of the vending machine’s display uses the font Set in Stone, a useable font designed by the artist and produced by Adrien Vasquez of John Morgan Studio, based on a collection of stones found on a beach by the artist’s children. For the font Gander says “These are the 50,000 year-old noises that constitute the basis for the sound of our vowels and in turn the beginning of language”. Other works of the exhibition are “Let the world take a turn, (Wall encounter)” (2018), a saying often repeated by the artist’s father when he was a young boy and “Agent of Connectivity” (2018), a holographic projection of a satellite phone, seeming to hover in mid-air
* During the film’s production, the British Government had announced that it would prohibit its exhibition in the United Kingdom, in keeping with its appeasement policy concerning Nazi Germany, also the film was banned in several Latin American countries, where there were active movements of Nazi sympathizers.
Info: gb agency, 18 Rue des Quatre-Fils, Paris, Duration: 13/10-24/11/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-13:00 & 14:00-19:00, www.gbagency.fr
