He chose the dark “cave” in the basement of the Palais de Tokyo, rather than its bright white spaces, to transform it into “captivating landscape” : Pierre Bal-Blanc offers here an experience, more than an exhibition. An expert in shows, the French commissioner, based in Greece for about ten years, orchestrated a three-week program that changes every day. In the black labyrinth of the institution, between the pit, the spiral staircase and the cinema hall that has become a place of sound immersion, bodies, images, words, sometimes a breath emerge.
Balkan, conceptual, ascetic or volcanic, the whole is as rich as it is radical: the most zealous lovers of artistic discoveries could just as easily camp at the palace. Because Pierre Bal-Blanc reveals a series of rarities, which he unfolds in space and time as a conductor, as he has already done at the Monnaie in Brussels or at the Tate Modern in London. The dances of The people of Uterpan or Lenio Kakleathe rumors spread by Eva Barto or Matthieu Saladin, the compositions and poetry of the Hungarians Katalin Ladik and Svetlana Maras, but also Nina Canal & Nadia Lichtig, Luka Savic, Jean-Charles Massera, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci… stay for ten days to be surprised.
“Approximately thirty performances are orchestrated simultaneously or sequentially, with a daily schedule that varies between impromptu actions, encounters, films and works that appear and disappear in the space. No two visitors see the same thing”he promises. Sounds coming from the walls, water rising from the ground, a slightly strange visitor who might as well be an interpreter, an animal sound: you have to pay attention to every detail, lingering on the little things, to understand the project in its scope.
Deprivation, dishonor, shamelessness
To feed it, Pierre Bal-Blanc relied on two sources he knows like the back of his hand: the CNAP (National Center for Fine Arts) collection and that of Kontakt, in Vienna, which strives to list little-known modern art in Mitteleuropa and with whom he often collaborated. “In these former Eastern Bloc countries, performance is a strategy that has been widely used because it is able to dissolve and be stealthy, in resistance”he specifies.
But also the thought of the cynics of ancient Greece inspired him here. Hence the title of his project: Republic (cynical). “At a time when our Republic is the subject of debate, where we have never been so much, perhaps, in a cynical republic in the modern sense, I bring a republic of the ancient cynics, which is its exact opposite. Who advocates exile against fatherland, mixture against race, intelligence against blood…”he deciphers. He discovered this philosophy in Athens while envisioning Documenta 14 in 2017 with ten other curators. “Since then, I have lived this thought every day, in the very place of his birthsays this child of Diogenes, smiling. I discovered in it an alternative proposal for life, ecological, social, which echoes the project of the president of the Palais de Tokyo, Guillaume Désanges, inspired by permaculture. »
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