The museum of incest

The Museum of Incest : A Guided Tour © Neue Alte Brucke © Simon Fujiwara
photo © Anna-Lucie Feracci

What is the link between the first man on earth and the history of incest ? Could human existence be reduced to a tale of transgressive eroticism ? 
Simon Fujiwara's slide presentation transports us into a parallel reality made of whimsical thoughts, witty accounts of intimacy. The fluidity of his speech, the constant use of digression create a sense of de-construction of the narrative, an alternative auditive space, an heterotopia of language.
Fujiwara's imaginary architecture exists as a non-object, a non-space. A museum which artefacts don't really exist, since incest is taboo, which focuses on archeology, a science that isn't accurate, can only refer to a form of invisibility. 
The art of Fujiwara is the art to bewitch, the art to tell stories.

The alchemy of breathing

A travel without visual experience © Pak Sheung-chuen

A travel without visual experience started in Malaysia where Pak Sheung-chuen traveled blinded. Having to rely on his other senses to feel and guide himself along the journey, his photos document what he is supposed to have seen. On the gallery stand, the viewer is invited to re-enact the experience by taking pictures of his pictures in a darkened room, hoping to witness the journey later from the camera. 
Conceived like a "mise en abyme", the room is a parallel space, a mirror where to watch the past. 

© Pak Sheung-chuen

The extraordinary with Pak Sheung-chuen lies in the ordinary of life existence so he'll shop for the words of a supermaket bill, wait for all the people sleep, collect his breath, wait for a potential friend to turn up at a busy train station, as ways to explore randomness in urban environment.
Pak Sheung-chuen inhabits the world in a rather playful manner, using his mind as an ultimate place of freedom.

The vacuity of the Art Fair

Double fond © The Fair Gallery

For Frieze 2007, The Fair Gallery invited Aurelie Voltz to curate its stand : refusing the imposed model of commercial art environment, she turned the space into a domestic room, a jigsaw set-up inspired by the symbolics of Bachelard's Poetics of space with different artists' works interlaced around the themes of memory and intimacy.
Its title" Double fond " seemed to twist the conventional gallery's aim giving the art objects a second life. From time to time, a mother came on the stand to teach her young child to walk, a non normative, nearly invisible performance by Roman Ondak that positioned Double fond outside of the material realm.


Enigma 2 © Reena Spaulings

For Frieze 2009, Reena Spauling Gallery showcases Claire Fontaine's famous neons : their absence leaving space for a billing note.

Claire Fontaine reduces the contemporary art scene inspirations to dinner parties' conversations, a motto that borrows from Guy Debord's anticapitalist ideas and from the Situationists' fake exhibitions, a concept successfully transcended in Reena Spaulings' minimalists canvases, Enigmas 3 & 4 : Table cloth for Atforum dinner, Art Basel Miami.
Since Reena Spaulings duplicated the original concept in numerous copies, it proved financially successful - the anti-consumerist, anti-bourgeois objective also reaching a place counter-productive to what is initially claimed.

The great white hope © Marisa Argentato & Pasquale Pennacchio © T293

T293, a gallery which stand is intriguingly seductive in its minimalist choice is also part of Frieze 2009. 
T293 is designed like an empty shop by artists Marisa Argento and Pasquale Pennacchio, mounted like a platform of shelves and dressed with neo-conceptual neons. There is no work on display, the artists are represented by their catalogues : like Claire Fontaine and her detournements that challenge the notions of authorship.

The aim of the gallery is to redefine ways of exhibiting and viewing art, squeezing the viewers' imagination since the context announces an unseen content. 
One can think of the vacuity of the art fair, of the collecting of objects devoid of their essence once serving the sole purpose of being sold, their absence-presence on the booth questioning their newly gained status. 

Special thanks to T293 gallery