ART-PRESENTATION: Performance Day
On 2016 La Ferme du Buisson inaugurated Performance Day, an annual performance festival whose international programming includes curators from abroad with an emphasis on co-productions and freedom of movement for artists. Given artists’ growing interest in an interspace between the visual and the performing arts, the art Center is broadening its approach to include other sections of La Ferme du Buisson, and thus other resources, with a variety of projects involving the entire site.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson Archive
This year Performance Day is part of the Centre Pompidou’s 40th anniversary celebrations. Six international curators are joining forces for the programming of a festival combining the visual arts, theatre, film, music and literature, with a particular focus on the French and Portuguese scenes. Performance Day #2 is presenting 15 artists, 8 premieres, 2 exhibitions and “Digressions”, a new collection of conversations with artists. Since the ‘60s artists have been constantly challenging the museum as institution, its representational codes and dominant forms of rhetoric, its capacity to reify and standardize, its modes of exhibition and dissemination, its relationship with archives and collections, and the role it assigns to viewers and transmission. The curators are looking into the topic of the museum performed: how does a museum make history, what living memory does it build up, and what future is it modelling? To what extent does it contribute to a process of reification and at what point in time does it become a malleable object, transformed by historical, discursive, gestural and fictional sedimentations? Participating Artists: Béatrice Balcou, Marcelline Delbecq & Ellie Ga, Ben Evans & Luís Miguel Félix, Ricardo Jacinto, Onze Heures Onze Collective, Pétrel|Roumagnac (Aurélie Pétrel & Vincent Roumagnac), Kapwani Kiwanga, Catarina de Oliveira, Anouchka Oler, Projecto Teatral (João Rodrigues, Maria Duarte, Helena Tavares, André Maranha and Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida). Almost all the projects are new and are Ferme du Buisson productions or co-productions involving various partner bodies, together with La Galerie Centre d’art contemporain in Noisy-le-Sec and CNAP, Centre national des arts plastiques. The installation, “201 Full CT Blue (2), 106 Primary Red, 736 Twickenham Green, 101 Yellow” (2017 by the duo Pétrel|Roumagnac (Aurélie Pétrel & Vincent Roumagnac), is the outcome of a critical study of Jeff Wall, whose work lies somewhere between photography and mise en scène. The pair activate the installation several times a day. Referencing Wall’s “A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)”, the piece with its reactivation consists of a system for classifying large numbers of reproductions of five photographs taken during a residency in Montreal in 2014. The prints show a series of “throws” of multicoloured filters, used in both photography and the theatre. Béatrice Balcou presents “Cérémonie Sans Titre #10” (2017), her Untitled Ceremonies are performances centered on a work by another artist borrowed from a Public or Private Collection, and all of them generate a distinctive time frame involving a specific event: the exhibiting of the work of art. With precision and subtlety Balcou looks into the attention given to the materiality of the artwork and the behaviour of the spectator. Anouchka Olerhas in “provisionally untitled” (2017) imagined a dialogue between three animated sculptures, impetuous “actors” bent on knowing how they were made, and what and who they are made of. Simultaneously with these flippantly idiosyncratic demands, her speculative narratives raise the issue of how power circulates in the everyday course of things, the space it constructs, and the implications for the construction of the self.
Info: Curators: Julie Pellegrin, Xavier Franceschi, Nathalie Giraudeau, Cristina Grande, Ricardo Nicolau and Pedro Rocha, Centre d’art contemporain de la Ferme du Buisson, allée de la Ferme, Noisiel & Centre photographique d’Île-de-France, 107 avenue de la République, Cour de la ferme briarde, Pontault-Combault, Date 3/6/17, Hours 112:00-00:00, www.lafermedubuisson.com
