Exhibition

Beyond Les Rencontres Internationales, video and multimedia exhibitions are curated on the invitation of museums, biennales and art centres. They offer critical and progressive insight into areas with shifting boundaries, converging the aesthetic, social and political questions of our time, including issues related to changing modes of production and distribution.

Urban projections

Hakaranga Soko Art Centre, Yokohama, Japan | 22-06 to 01-07 2012

The French Institute of Yokohama invites Les Rencontres Internationales for an exhibition at the Hakaranga Soko. Entitled "Urban Projection", it brings together 14 international artists who who question the relationship between public and private space.

"We wanted to create a link between the exhibition and the very area and place where it takes place. place where it takes place. Redbrick WareHouse, at the harbour end of the Kannai district, questions through history since the middle of the 19th century, with the opening of the port of Yokohama to Western merchants and the the opening of the port of Yokohama to Western merchants and the construction of a district reserved for foreigners, the shape of which remains today. the place that a society assigns to foreigners, as well as the advent of a merchant society. society. Jaime Davidovitch's video piece documenting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estate" project in Matta-Clark's "Fake Estate" project in New York in 1973 seemed to us to be a particularly interesting way of displacing and and reformulate this double question in our contemporary time. Matta-Clark acquired unused and unusable plots of land at public auction, explores the gaps between buildings between buildings: a gap in the urban territory that we wanted to follow in our turn, where the question of our turn, where the question of the other and of the circulation of exchanges between individuals take place. Moreover, this critical approach also appears as a paradigm of the artistic artistic approach that consists of investing and questioning the interstices of established meanings. established meanings. This question refers to the idea of borders, differentiation but also porosity between spaces that are a priori distinct: an ambivalent relationship between a space that is delimited to an ambivalent relationship between a space that is delimited in order to circumscribe it and an abandoned space to which no exchange value is given. A dialectic of the outside and the inside, of the reverse and the right side involving a reversal of point of view. Also, more than the question of the way in which the other is viewed, what we wanted to explore is an abstract question, that of the abstract question, that of a symbolism of exchanges and vacant spaces. The works in the exhibition are based on questions of urbanism and habitat, such as rational planning for profit and exchange, poles emerging in no-man's-land, or around man's land, or around questions of the projection of the self in a given cultural space. The works draw a shifting mental geography. Between the common spaces and the utilitarian spaces of our of our cities, the exhibition proposes a reflection on our contemporary visual culture and our representations. Jean-François Rettig, Nathalie Hénon - Curators.

EXHIBITED ARTISTS

Jaime Davidovich, Gordon Matta-Clark : Reality Properties - Fake Estates | USA, 1975

Carlos Irijalba : Unwilling Spectator | Spain / China, 2010

Prokop Vignon : sans titre | France, 2011

Alain Declercq, Jeanne Susplugas : Civil protection | France / Switzerland, 2011

Elsa Fauconnet : The burrow (2) | France, 2011

Didier Faustino : Exploring Dead Building | France / Georgia, 2010

Libia Castro, Ólafur Olafsson : Il Tuo Paese Non Esiste (Your country doesn't exist), 2011 | Spain / Iceland / Italy, 2011

Christian Barani : | My Dubaï Life | France / Dubaï, 2011

John Menick : Occupation | USA / France, 2006

Knut Asdam : Tripoli | Norway / Lebanon, 2010

Louidgi Beltrame : Gunkanjima | France / Japan, 2010

Cécile Hartmann : Achrone | France / United Arab Emirates, 2011

Christian Merlhiot : The trip to Japan, diary | France / Japan, 1999

Hans Op de Beeck : Staging Silence | Belgium, 2009