Catalogue > At random

In a wooden amphitheatre built in 1933 for the study of animals and plants, a group of ancient tools attend a lecture. The talk seems to be about animals and their movements, but the tools gradually come to understand that it’s about the living beings that have given them their names and sometimes even their shapes.

Born in Paris in 1990, Arthur Debert lives and works between Nancy and Berlin. Arthur Debert’s protean practice is rooted in collective work and exchange. Anchored in a contextual approach, his work takes shape through travel, encounters and multiple collaborations. Central to these exchanges is the question of the transmission and survival of knowledge. Objects encountered in the field are seen as both witnesses and bearers of epistemological narratives to be deciphered. To reveal the different cultural layers sedimented within them, the artist disrupts their temporal linearity through shifting spatial settings and collective activations. Installations, videos and editions then fix the ephemeral, indeterminate state of the resulting lived experiences. Arthur Debert is a graduate of the École de l’Image in Épinal (2011), the École Supérieure d’Art de Lorraine in Metz (2013) and participated in the École Offshore in Shanghai (2014-2015), a research program of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Nancy. His work has been shown at Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel (2025), Triennale de la Jeune Création (Luxembourg, 2013 and 2021), Koraï (Cyprus, 2023), Ann Arbor Film Festival (Michigan, 2022), Berlin Art Prize (2018) and Berlin Independent Film Festival (2023).