ART-PRESENTATION: Metaphoria III
The Metaphoria exhibition project started in 2012 with a dialogue between the Portuguese poet Rui Costa and the Paris-based curator Silvia Guerra. The initial idea was to enable a dialogue between poetry (and metaphors) as a means of transportation for images, ideas, places, among others, and the visual arts. Simple house-moving boxes where used in the dialogue as a metaphor.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Lab’Bel Archive
The entire “Metaphoria” series has been produced by Lab’Bel, in collaboration with venues that have succeeded in welcoming and presenting each exhibition as a research platform or think tank. “Metaforia I” (29/9-10/11/11) was on show at Martins Sarmento Society Museum in Guimarães, Portugal, and “Metaphoria II” (8-30/9/13) in an abandoned building in district Metaxourghio, overlooking the city of Athens, Greece, in the context of Biennale ReMap-Athènes. “Metaphoria III” takes place in Le 104 in Paris, which for over 120 years was the municipal funeral home. The first hall, on the Rue d’Aubervilliers, was used for the fabrication of coffins. Silvia Guerra, Curtor of the exhibition says “On New Year’s Day 2017, Rui’s father emailed me the PDF version of his son’s last unpublished novel, “Les Dialogues d’Adam et Eve au seuil d’un Monde Nouveau”. It has served as the inspiration for the third and latest component of Metaphoria. In this dialogue between Her and Him, Eve dies in a car accident. Adam brings her back to life. However, they do without the services of the serpent in Genesis. Ulysses is also there: a rich, power-hungry individual who dreams of transposing into real life the characters from the films he has collected over the years. The devil is also there, overwhelmed by his lack of power in the Instagram era”. On show are works by: Nina Beier, Adriano Costa, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Kenneth Goldsmith, David Horvitz, Ana Jotta, Jeremy Millar, Pepo Salazar and Karin Sander. Nina Beier is interested in social and political issues related to the representation and exchange of values. She produces works characterized by both the notions of conflict and correlation. Her installations surprise both by their surreal dimension and their varying scales. By transforming the relationships between objects and images, visual referents become real objects in turn. In “Man” (2017) Nina Beier subverts a symbol of French gastronomy in a rather disturbing manner, and in “Automobile” (2017), the sculptures move themselves, hair blowing in the wind. Adriano Costa’s sculptures and installations update the modernist and Minimalist legacies of geometric abstraction for contemporary Brazil through the use of everyday objects. Costa, who, following a discussion on life, death, and how to erase the parameters of our past, present and future, suggested welcoming visitors to the exhibition with a message on a doormat. Hans-Peter Feldmann would not describe himself as an artist. He is a compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera. His works have an aesthetic and conceptual simplicity. His sculptures of “Eve” and “David” which are part of Lab’Bel Collection, are being lent from the Musée des Beaux Arts de Dole for the exhibition. The enticing tie between the language and digital media in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith is a starting point from which all sorts of experiments are being articulated. This influential thinker of a contemporary moment has been switching from one media to another but stayed true to his own politically and socially inclined agenda. Although each project or work of his is conceptual, text-based and essentially related to poetry, Goldsmiths uses any means to establish communication with the wide audience in order to speak about the burgeoning issues, like censorship or plagiarism, which color our society. Goldsmith is best known for having created the archival resource site for avant-garde arts and literature known as UbuWeb, and for his research around “uncreativity as a creative practice”, based on plagiarism, copying and retranscription, examples of the techniques and strategies he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Mail art, artist’s books, watercolours, and urban interventions, many of which occur in atypical places such as beaches put David Horvitz’s practice into a logic of networks, especially virtual ones. His interventions, seemingly simple and part of our daily lives, subvert digital communication and the diffusion of information by recalling thematrix-like force of oceans, rivers and constellations. The emails sent by David Horvitz to Silvia Guerra, read like poems. Despite the time difference between Los Angeles, Paris and the north of Portugal, theycontinue to talk about everything we would like to do for “Metaphoria III”. Over five decades, Ana Jotta has produced an extreme disparate oeuvre. She combines painting with sculpture and prints, sometimes in an Old Master style, sometimes folksy or with appropriations from 20th Century popular culture, and experimenting with techniques traditionally associated with the ‘minor arts’. Ana Jotta takes the idea of transport in the strictest sense of the word: she sends her works in the mail, in the form of posters, a new series created for the exhibition. Jeremy Millar’s debut came not as an artist but as a curator. In 1994, when he was an unemployed photography graduate from Nottingham Polytechnic, he won a competition asking for unknown artists to propose an exhibition for London’s ICA. The confusion between reality and fiction in Millar’s works feeds on his vast literary knowledge, as well as on the lives of the authors from whom he draws inspiration, based around Rimbaud’s principle of “I am another”. Forming his artistic practice around several different methods of portrayal, Pepo Salazar focuses more on the attitude of the piece and what it is referring to than the physical form it will assume. In an anti-aesthetic, direct manner, his display of a single piece is often comprised of several different media, some of which include soundscapes, assemblages, installations and performances made out of video, sound, metal, fluorescent tubes, and other various materials. Jeremy Millar and Pepo Salazar have created new installations, especially for the exhibition. Central pieces, designed by two of the first artists with whom the exhibition’s dialogue first began, are works in progress and are as yet, untitled. Karin Sander is a conceptual artist whose approach – installations, architectural interventions, 3D photographs and paintings – develops from precise protocols. The artist aims to question the contexts and conditions of the systems of production and diffusion of art, such as museums, art centres and public spaces. Her works are generally articulated with specific uses allowing them to evolve, thereby modifying their perception by the spectator during the exhibition. Every weekend, from 14:00 to 19:00, actors Simon Labrosse, Raphaëlle de la Bouillerie, Quentin Raymond, Olivia Stainier, Ricardo Vaz Trindade will be present in the space of the exhibition for readings of the Dialogues of Adam and Eve after Rui Costa. On the opening day, October 6 at 2:00 pm and in the evening, the rapper Shirt will give performance from “Theory” by Kenneth Goldsmith. Experimental harpist Hélène Breschand already linked to the project from its first edition will give a concert on October 13 at 18:00.
Info: Curator: Silvia Guerra, Ateliers 0 & 1 of Le Centquatre-Paris, 104 rue d’Aubervilliers-Paris, Duration: 6/10-11/11/18, Days & Hours: Wed-Sun 14:00-19:00, http://www.104.fr & www.lab-bel.com
