The Attentive Indian, Clement Kogitor, 2017
Funnel Stage, Bertrand Ramash, 2008-2015
During the war-torn World War I, Armenians in the Ottoman Empire suffered a brutal extermination massacre. Researchers generally believe that between 1914 and 1918, more than 1 million Armenians died or were massacred during the deportation process. The Armenian Genocide is also known as the "Three Genocides of the 20th Century" along with the Holocaust of Nazi Jews and the Genocide in Rwanda.
In the 1920s, a group of Armenian girls, many of whom were survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, made beautiful carpets in an orphanage workshop in Lebanon. The Armenian girls made a huge carpet 5.5 meters long and 3 meters wide and presented to the White House, which 400 girls took 18 months to weave. However, for a number of complex reasons, the carpet rarely appears in the White House.
A Carpet..., Joanna Haji Thomas and Khalil Joregie, 2012
"Along a Road That Would Not Have Been" exhibition site
In 2017, Lebanese-born matrimonial artist Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige used the topic as a motivation to complete a carpet..., which consists of a woven carpet, 40 prints of archival materials and three videos. In "A Carpet...", the pattern of the woven carpet is the Cedar IV rocket stamp issued by the space program in 1964, while in the Lebanon space race program, there are many orphans and their descendants involved in the Massacre.
"Duchamp Prize" artist exhibition, from France to China
Joanna Haji Thomas & Khalil Choregee is the winner of the 2017 Prix Marcel-Duchamp Award. Their creations involve archaeology, history, politics and other disciplines, and are intended to awaken people's memories and reflections on history and cities through historical hooks.
Presidential Album, Joanna Haji Thomas and Khalil Joregie, 2012
The Duchamp Prize, established under the name of Henri Robert Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), the "Father of Contemporary Art" has been in existence for 19 years and was founded in 2000 by the French International Federation of Art Communication Commissioners (ADIAF). The Duchamp Prize was originally established to encourage the creativity and vitality of French art and to enhance the visibility of French contemporary art internationally.
Horse Racing Day, Mohammed Buruisa, 2015
Every year, the Duchamp Prize selects the most innovative and outstanding artists from among those who work or reside in France. Each edition of the Duchamp Prize is nominated by a collectors' committee of 400 collectors from ADIAF, and four artists are selected for the final nomination list in the fields of plastic and visual arts, and an international jury of critics, curators, heads of art institutions, etc., selects one of the four artists as the final winner. The winners receive a prize of €35,000, while the four finalists will be able to exhibit at the Centre Pompidou from October to January of the following year.
To date, more than seventy artists have been nominated for the Duchamp Prize, and ADIAF has held more than fifty exhibitions for the Duchamp Prize around the world, making the Duchamp Prize one of the most prestigious international awards for contemporary art comparable to the British Turner Prize.
The Taming of the Horses, Mohammed Bruiza, 2014
However, regarding the value of the "Duchamp Prize" in France, a Chinese artist who works and lives in Paris told art news Chinese edition: "The prize is run entirely by private collectors, and although it has also become an influential literary and artistic encouragement award in contemporary art, the French cultural circle pursues freedom and freedom first, and will not be developed or attracted attention because of any reward." ”
Unlike the situation of the "Duchamp Prize" in France, in recent years, the "Duchamp Prize" works have frequently appeared in China. In May 2017, the exhibition "High Pressure - Duchamp Prize • French Contemporary Art Scene" opened at the Red Brick Art Museum, and the works of eight Duchamp Prize winners gathered in this exhibition.
The exhibition site of "High Pressure - Duchamp Prize: French Contemporary Art Scene"
In 2018, the "Rong - Duchamp Award-nominated Artists Exhibition" curated by Jér?me Sans was exhibited at the Tsinghua University Art Museum. The works of Wang Du, the first generation of Chinese artists to France, are also on display.
"Rong - Exhibition of Works by Duchamp Prize-Nominated Artists" scene of Cayder Atia's "Ring Theory"
Subsequently, "Sword Rattling - Looking at French Contemporary Art Through the Marcel Duchamp Prize" was launched at the Guangdong Museum of Art, and the works of the eight Duchamp Award-winning artists landed in Guangzhou for the first time.
On April 26, shortly after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral, the "March on the Road That Didn't Exist – An Exhibition of 14 Duchamp Prize Artists" (hereinafter referred to as "Walking Along the Road That Didn't Exist") kicked off at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing. The exhibition strives to present the diverse face of French contemporary art and the Duchamp Prize in a new way. This exhibition also kicked off the 55th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France and the 14th "Festival Croisements" series of celebrations.
Introducing Annabelle Ténèze, curator of "Walking on a Road That Didn't Have," the exhibition features the Spanish poet Antonio Machado's poem "Your footsteps are the road, forthere is no road", starting from the concepts of roads, displacements, travel, and discovery. Select exhibited works. "Every work becomes an outward opening, a path of discovery," she says.
Eagles Don't Catch Flies at the exhibition site, Mircha Canter, 2018
However, under a very abstract theme, the gathering of a group of contemporary art works with a wide range of topics and complexity is inevitable that many contemporary art exhibitions will appear as a common problem - the incomprehensible form, the lack of the context of the creation of the work and the background of the times. Obviously, the theme of "marching along the road that does not exist" can neither dominate the works on display, nor can it summarize or convey some of the characteristics of French contemporary art, and in the eyes of many viewers, to understand French contemporary art, the exhibition can only "peek at the leopard in the tube".
Through the "Duchamp Prize", you can look at French contemporary art
At the end of 2018, riots erupted in the city of Paris, which the media described as "violence and shouting that occupied the entire city of Paris". On April 15, 2019, the famous landmark of Paris, Paris, France, caught fire, the fire spread rapidly, the spire collapsed in the fire, and the world once again focused on France. Is Paris today still the "art capital" that artists are fascinated by?
Notre-Dame fire, April 15, 2019. Fabien Barrau / AFP / Getty Images
In 1919, Duchamp added two mustaches to the Mona Lisa with a pencil, so that the "Mona Lisa with a beard" became a masterpiece in the history of Western contemporary art. A hundred years later, art exhibitions named after Duchamp have appeared frequently in China, what kind of French contemporary art do they convey? What kind of french contemporary art has appeared in the hundred years after Duchamp's fame?
Running Beijing, Michelle Braggy, 2019
Michel Blazy, a 1966-born artist from Monaco, created a special work for the Beijing exhibition, "Running Beijing", who was the winner of the 2008 Duchamp Prize. In his work, he uses 20 second-hand sneakers collected in China to plant different varieties of plants, which grow freely during the exhibition, and organic objects are combined with everyday objects to create a picture of symbiosis between man and nature. This is also one of the characteristics of Braggy's artistic creation: the use of living, perishable organic matter as materials, emphasizing the concept of organic energy and time.
Two by Seven, Ulla von Brandenburg, 2018
Born in 1974, German artist Ulla Von Brandenburg's 2018 two-by-seven is undoubtedly the most popular work on site. The artist uses a large coloring "curtain" to create a temporary soft building, where the viewer walks through the door hole made of ropes and walks through it, where Internet celebrities punch in and take pictures. His works were exhibited in Basel, Hong Kong in 2018 and at the inaugural Pingyao International Sculpture Festival in 2018 and remain very popular.
Born in Colmar, France in 1983, the music of Clément Cogitore's work "The Attentive Indian" made the entire exhibition hall come alive. In The Attentive Indian, the "Mad Dance," which originated in the African-American neighborhood of Los Angeles, meets the Baroque dance of the 18th century, and the title of the work is borrowed from the first opera ballet created by the Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1735.
Horse Racing Day Series, Mohammed Bruisa, 2014
Mohamed Bourouissa, an artist living in France and Algeria, wrote about the relationship between blacks and horse racing in Horse Day. He had an exhibition of the same name in 2018 at the Musée d'art moderne de la Villede Paris. Briisa works with a community in Philadelphia, USA, where horses, stables, and horseback riding play an important role. The work, which consists of posters, sketches, paintings and videos, hides black cowboys, territorial encroachment, and local history.
Golden Records, Joanna Haji Thomas & Khalil Joregie, 2011
Annabel Tenez said that the works in the exhibition resonate with humanities, poetry and politics, although confined to regional history, they are deeply rooted in human reality, hidden in the fears and hopes arising from travel and cultural exchanges.
These young artists either followed In Duchamp's footsteps, or inherited Duchamp's subversive view of art, and even took a completely different path from Duchamp. Artists from different countries, speaking different mother tongues, growing up in different cultural backgrounds, show cultural diversity and inclusiveness in France, and perhaps this is where the vitality and vitality of French contemporary art today lies.
As Alfred Pacquement, a former curator of the Duchamp Prize, puts it, for today's Duchamp Prize exhibition, "it's just a combination of the works of the best artists in French contemporary art." Peeping at the leopard in the tube, what we see may only be a "spot" of French contemporary art. These exhibited works construct a fragmented and metaphorical world, but they also reflect the current trend of diversification of artistic creation, allowing viewers to understand French contemporary art from different perspectives. (Written by Huang Hui)
(Article from TANC)