Two series will be presented on the occasion of Harald Fernagu’s new exhibition at the Polaris Gallery:

As we go along

Harald Fernagu worked fromt photographic documents of buildings from the 1970s in Moldova and Tajikistan. As these buildings were abandoned by the public authorities, their balconies were annexed by the inhabitants who, with the help of disparate salvaged windows, built new spaces to enlarge their flats. Without any consultation, this collective bricolage follows the lines of the building, respects the shape of the balconies and by repeated modules – the windows – amplifies the rhythms of verticality and horizontality.

By becoming the architects of their daily lives, these inhabitants challenge the authority of the imposing building, like small domestic revolutions. In the series As we go along, thanks to the game of scale that the model enables, using only recycled material, Harald Fernagu builds the architectural manifesto of these popular revolutions where the walls seem more inhabited than the spaces they design.

Contrast is undoubtedly the element that most allows the artist to experience reality. He is in perpetual search of the otherness of the spaces and people he meets. What questions him, a contradiction, an anachronism, all these micro resistances to rules and customs appeal to him. They force him to perfect his language, to question his knowledge.

From these experiences Harald Fernagu constructs forms, sculptures, and sometimes images that are themselves bearers of otherness. He tries to build a reality from this by creating a possible sharing of the experience of the other with the other.

To this new series, Harald Fernagu has decided to add, for the first time at the Galerie Polaris, a series of photographs made with the companions of Emmaüs. Noting that people suffering from social exclusion are as much prisoners of their social status as of the imagery commonly produced around their faces, Harald Fernagu decided to deconstruct this « imagery » by making a photographic work with them, using their humour and prejudices as props.

Coming from the assesment that the consequences of the colonial period on our everyday life were too often ignored, the artist has been for the past few years questioning himself on an identity troubled by an impose filiation.

It is from those objects of rituals and cult that the artist defines as « coming from contemporary African touristic trade «  that he models their shapes. By pairing, layering and adding other objets from this « touristic art », he then dresses them with shells or seed nails.

With those sculptures, Harald Fernagu offers to decolonise stereotypes. Here, no beautiful statues but skeletons bending to the artist’s reinterpretation. Shapes make way for lines, the narration allows to fill in the blanks of history, or to suggest a new reading of it.

A dialogue is then created between a formal esthetique that belongs to the codes of globalise contemporay art, and another esthetique belonging to tribal arts created for a certain proximity.

Furthermore, an exchange between the art pieces and the spectator occurs. Through the reactualisation of the question of appropriation and it’s legitimity, the piece conjugates in the present. The spectator gives life to the object and allows it to get out of it’s past museal representation. The public can then see behind Harald Fernagu’s open humor, a falsely authentic or a real fake touristic sculpture.  Rather than to create a God, the artist from his own words »suggests the ritual that serves him, invites the spectator’s body to feel it by building objects touchable in their plasticity and their look ». It is with benevolence that the objects are being reincarnated with a newly found strengh.

Thus with the exhibition Dogon’s Hypothesis, Harald Fernagu does not only suggests a new view point, but also a new eye.

Vernissage in the artist’s presence Thursday 21 November from 4 PM to 8.30 PM

And Saturday 24 November from 3 PM to 8.30 PM

(The one who comes from afar)

Zimbabwean born artist, Richard Mudariki, presents his debut solo exhibition in Europe with a series of works on paper and paintings on canvas.

Mudariki (b.1985) who began his practice in Harare some 18 years ago, was a student of many established Zimbabwean artists who instructed him at an early age of fourteen years. Despite his move to Cape Town, South Africa in 2008 where he now lives and works, Mudariki remains at the forefront of Zimbabwean visual arts.

Mudariki’s paintings speaks not only to world politics, the events and issues, but also negotiates the personal politics of his own art practice, continually defining his territory as a painter who crystallises his own motivations and intent.  As he continues to define his own practice, Mudariki remains aware of his position as an artist from the African continent adjacent to the canon of Western history of painting. Referencing and combining some classic paintings from Western art history, Mudariki engages in a complex act of parody, critique and self-reflection. In it, he continues an ever-evolving discussion of how an artist is to engage, on both a personal and professional level, with a canon that has historically excluded and occluded artists from Africa.

Some of the paintings in the exhibition include ‘A View from the artist’s studio’ (acrylic on canvas), in which the artist assumes the role of a witness of his time. As the title informs, the scene is that of his studio, with a French window that frames the discontent of the masses in France, America and United Kingdom. A spotless palette and a canvas turned away from us begs for us to ask questions – is he opening his studio to the world or is the world suggesting to him a scene for a brand new painting? A painting within the painting, the window becomes a mise en abyme of the artist’s work. Like Jan Van Eyck in Les Epoux Arnolfini, the piece becomes a reflection of the world and a portrait of the artist’s status.

Other paintings being showed include, Bira reClimate Change – A traditional Shona rain ceremonial is taking place on stage in front of an audience. The all white dressed musicians play a traditional Zimbabwean instrument, ‘mbira’ (a lamellophone) with a spirit medium ‘angel’ figure, wings spread, seems to be the conductor of this orchestra. In the lush green background, vocalists and a hand waving a Zimbabwean flag emerge. The middle foreground shows a globe of the world, with a thermometer that indicates that its temperature is rising.

Like a stage director, painting all his characters to make them “play” in his visual drama; Mudariki allows us to apprehend the political situation of this world, without ever directing us to the next act.

Vernissage(s)  in the presence of the artist: Saturday October12  from 4PM to 8.30 PM

and Sunday October 13 from 2PM to 6PM.

On the occasion of  the Fiac and  during Fiac galerie’s nocturnal Thursday October 17th from 6PM to 10PM in the presence of the artist.

The spectator only recalls the parts kept in color in which Picasso is painting on a glass slab, he does not remember that the movie is mainly in black and white.

The exhibition The Real World is in black and white leads to the questioning of the notion of truth in color. A new found unity between night and day can be perceived.

The exhibition presents pieces from different artists working around black and around white, or using color in a way that unexpectedly, doesn’t give the spectator the immediate impression to be in front of color.

Eric AUPOL – Bart BAELE – Yto BARRADA – Marcos CARRASQUER – John CASEY – Simon FAITHFULL – Vanessa FANUELE – Harald FERNAGU – Speedy GRAPHITO – Louis HEILBRONN – Christian LHOPITAL – Sara OUHADDOU – Werner ROHDE – Nigel ROLFE – Laure TIXIER – Adrien VERMONT – Simon WILLEMS

Opening Saturday April 22 in the presence of the artist

Val Fourré, Chêne Pointu, Noyer Renard, Chantepie…, these names that refer to fauna and flora or evoke pastoral landscapes, are actually the names of a number of large housing project, assemblies of blocks and towers gathering a minimum of ’800 housings, that is 4 000 individuals — according to the philosopher Thierry Paquot—, built between 1955 and 1975.

These toponyms with a bucolic sound symbolize the ills of contemporary cities and focus on their social issues. Most often, the estates are no more referred to by their actual names but are qualified as: sensitive neighbourhoods, suburbs, urban priority zone, no go zone…

Inspired by a residency at the Val Fourré (Mantes-la-Jolie*), projects at Noyer Renard (Athis-Mons*) and Grand Vaux (Savigny-sur-Orge*), reviving memories of her childhood at Fontaine du Bac (Clermont-Ferrand), Laure Tixier tells the short history of these projects: originally rural landscapes, they were meant to glorify the idea of modernity and all they became is nothing but modern ghettos.

In the light of bees’ modus vivendi, Tixier studies how we decide (or how one decides for us) to live together, via which processes, through which systems, in what form and through which relationship with the landscape.

Formes collectives’ topics are illustrated by watercolours, ceramics, installation, video; as many oxymorons opposing modernity (and its disqualification) and the preciosity/the meticulous use of these materials.

The three watercolours of the series Les essaims (The swarms), are about the distance covered between modernist pre-World II collective housing (more specifically social housing), and further gigantic housing estates. Seen from a distance, what seem to be geometric shapes become, when you get closer, vibrant clouds made of millions of bees.

These swarms have successively taken the form of Henri Sauvage’s Immeuble des Amiraux (Paris, 1922), of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse (Marseille, 1952), and one of Raymond Lopez’ Tours Degas at the Val Fourré (Mantes-la-Jolie, 1972).

Les ruchers (The apiaries) made of model beehives of the three buildings stand next to The swarms. Made of wood with standard frames, the mock-up of the Tour Degas, destroyed in 2006 by implosion, is habitable by bees. Those potential workers come after the Renault factories workers for whom one of France’s biggest housing projects was designed and built.

Laure Tixier’s work with inhabitants of the estates, started in 2014 with the series of embroideries Radar au fil du temps (presented in 2016 in the exhibition « Unravelled » at the Beirut Art Center), gave her the opportunity to highlight their trauma and relief that were the destruction of the towers ten years earlier during the urban renovation.  Entire parts of private lives were pulverised in a few seconds and broadcasted live on TV.

Further, two earthenware beehives are a reminder of the early days of apiculture, when a human being caught a swarm of bees and slid it into an earthenware. Here, the earthenware is no longer egg-shaped but makes use of the vocabulary of housing estates projects: the tower and the block, a vertical rectangle and a horizontal one.

*Located on the outskirts of Paris

Born in the Isle of Wight in 1950, Rolfe has lived and worked in Dublin, Ireland since 1974. He has worked intensively and made significant contributions as an artist, curator, activist and scholar. Rolfe is an elected member of the Irish association of artists, Aosdana. His work—spanning live performance, ( since 1975 ) photography, ( since 1979 ) video ( since 1980 )  and sound—has received international acclaim and has been presented in five continents, in more than 30 countries. Rolfe has created live performances throughout Europe, in the former Eastern Block, in North and South America, in the Far East—in China, Korea and Japan. De Appel in Amsterdam, Franklin Furnace in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London were early champions of Rolfe’s installation and performance work. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Irish Museum Of Modern Art in Dublin and at the Musee D’Art Moderne de la Ville De Paris. He has exhibited in the Dublin, Paris, Sao Paulo, Busan, Kwangju and Venice Biennales and presented in numerous international art fairs.

PRACTICE
The central contention of Rolfe’s practice is that art making is a live and vital engagement. He studied sculpture and in the 1970’s used the term « Sculptures In Motion » to describe his work using materials across time—long before the term performance was put forward as any descriptor. Later these direct material engagements became highly produced and staged. Rolfe employed multi-media to articulate his largely political and activist voice as an artist. The demands Rolfe placed on large-scale production 1980s led to his ongoing research and engagement with audio and video/film production. Hand on Face was shown worldwide to an audience of 600 million people in 67 countries at the Concert To release Nelson Mandela in 1988 at Wembley Stadium in London. Rolfe continues to install sound and video work produced at broadcast standard.

He employs video not as a tool of documentation but to investigate and test his own physical and psychological limits, using his body as a site for challenging his limitations and revealing vulnerability.

Nigel Rolfe’s work engages sociopolitical concerns of have and have-not and fault lines in society. Since moving to Ireland he has been consistently involved in such issues both locally and directly. At the time of the death of Ann Lovett, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl from Granard, County Longford, who died giving birth beside a grotto on 31 January 1984, Rolfe wrote Middle of The Island. Recorded by Christy Moore and Sinead O’Conner, this song has become a world music classic and epitaph as monument and marker to her short life and sad end. Rolfe’s work with sound and audio production includes a number of internationally distributed recordings that have widespread recognition, notable Lament on Real World Records, 1992. Lament, a recording of traditional musicians created as a monument to the loss of life in Irelands urban war « The Troubles », was listed as one of Rolling Stone Magazines best albums of all-time, and described as « a stunning piece of work…each track is a call to the spirits of life in the face of devastation. »

Meeting with the artist at Polaris Galerie on  Friday May 29 at 5 pm

And Saturday May 30 from 12 to 6 pm

Known for his work about darkness and light in spaces and architecture, the French talented photographer Eric Aupol focuses for the first time on the remnants of a genuine figure of the early twentieth century: Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault.

Clérambault was a famous psychiatrist (he will be the mentor of Jacques Lacan) and a photographer. He also taught the art of drapery at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. As Chief doctor at the Infirmerie Psychiatrique Spéciale de la Préfecture de Police de Paris he had the opportunity to study numerous cases of mental disorders such as erotomania. He also developed a theory regarding some women’s erotic passion for fabric such as silk. The maréchal Lyautey asked him to establish a modern psychiatric facility in Morocco. Clérambault lived in Fès (1918-1919) where he took no less than one thousand photographies  all of which are drapery studies. He committed suicide in1934 at the age of 62.

This strange and mesmerizing exhibition is a tribute to Clérambault. It embraces four aspects of his achievements : The Studies of bodies and draperies are reminders of his classes at the Beaux Arts. Le quartier du Maristane is the Fès hospital  where Clérambault worked. Les pages tableaux and Les objets-outils.