Une exposition du collectif et meutes (Julie Aybes & brigitte Mouchel)

et meutes est un collectif d’artistes à géométrie variable, qui se donne comme objectif d’aller à la rencontre de visages et de paysages, de questionner, d’expérimenter, en coopération, explorant des démarches et médias artistiques pluriels.

“Nous cherchons à donner à voir une image du monde qui ne soit pas rassurante, ni confortable, qui pousse à la vigilance, à l’attention pour ce qu’on entend, ce qu’on voit, ce qu’on perçoit. Nous tentons de montrer la complexité du monde contemporain, la manière fragmentée dont il nous arrive, là où l’histoire collective croise, traverse, se heurte aux histoires singulières, aux territoires parcourus en mémoire ou en rêve, à la recherche de lieux et de récits possibles. Nous cherchons à provoquer et mettre en éveil les sens, les perceptions, y compris l’intuition, et ce qui nous advient : l’imaginaire, les réminiscences, les songes.”

De l’été 2021 au printemps 2022, l’artiste a arpenté les méandres du quartier Colombier en imaginant divers protocoles d’exploration au fur et à mesure de sa résidence.

A partir de prises de notes, de collectes d’objets et d’expériences sur le terrain, l’artiste réalise un inventaire sensible et intuitif d’un territoire et de son histoire. Au fil du temps, des passerelles se tissent entre les différents fragments, entre le passé et le présent, entre le dehors et le dedans.

Au PHAKT, Anthony Folliard transforme l’espace d’exposition en un lieu imaginaire de projections et d’aventures, à mi-chemin entre le campement, le laboratoire graphique et l’atelier de bricolage. Contre-point d’une résidence menée exclusivement dans l’espace public, l’exposition Camp de base est à la fois la restitution d’un processus de recherche et le point de départ de nouvelles expéditions à venir explorant la pluralité du paysage urbain.

Anita Conti, born in May 1899 and died in 1997 is an oceanographer and photographer. In 1943, the government of Algiers commissioned her to research the fish resources of the West African coast and the traditional fishing methods practiced there; thus, for almost ten years, Anita Conti devoted herself to studying and prospecting the coasts of Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, an experience she recounted in her book published in 1957, Giants of the Seas hot. In partnership with the Archives of Lorient, Marie Béatrice le Berrigaud, director of the Lieu de la Photographie, is offering an unprecedented exhibition retracing the journey of Anita Conti on the coasts of Guinea.

An exhibition in partnership with the Archives of Lorient, Pêcheurs du monde festival and the François Mitterand Media Library

Au printemps 2022, plusieurs expositions prennent place dans la ville de Landivisiau, mettant à l’honneur la création sculptée.

Du 5 mars au 1^er mai, l’Espace culturel Lucien-Prigent accueille les œuvres de deux artistes :

> Au rez-de-chaussée, Juan ARANAGA, lauréat du Salon de sculpture 2020, présente des sculptures en acier, en granit et en verre, aux côtés d’œuvres picturales.

> À l’étage, la plasticienne Meghan MAUCHERAT DE LONGPRÉ, originaire de Landivisiau, expose des volumes, dessins et installations créés pour le lieu.

Aux mêmes dates, trois autres expositions vous invitent à déambuler dans la ville, résultats d’un appel à projets reconduit pour la 7^e année consécutive :

> Dans le parc de Kréac’h Kélenn : sculptures métal – Anthony BOËFFARD.

> À la fontaine Saint-Thivisiau : installation aquatique – Léa B-H.

> Sur le parvis de l’Hôtel de Ville : sculpture – Thoma RYSE.

En parallèle, du 5 mars au 3 avril, place au 33^e Salon de sculpture contemporaine, dans le hall de l’Hôtel de Ville.

Organisé par la Ville de Landivisiau et l’Association Sculpteurs Bretagne, le Salon accueille cette année 36 sculpteurs et 98 œuvres. Ce rendez-vous permet aux publics de découvrir la pluralité des techniques et matériaux.

The exhibition entitled ‘L’invention d’une histoire vraie (2) (Inventing a true story)’ follows the wanderings of Nelly Monnier (1988, France) and Eric Tabuchi (1959, France) through the French countryside. Following their recent exhibition at the GwinZegal art centre in Guingamp, this pair of artists presents part of their Atlas des Régions Naturelles (ARN) (Atlas of the Natural Regions) and a series of sculptural and pictorial works resulting from it.

It all began with an idea that was both mad and extremely time-consuming: to photograph and document the vernacular architecture in all the natural regions of France – quite a vague notion – from French Flanders to the Outre Forêt area of Alsace, from the Freto region of Corsica to Béarn in the Pyrenees or Léon in Finistère. It was a huge undertaking, halfway between a quest straight out of a heroic fantasy novel and an absurd and comic adventure à la Monty Python. Monnier and Tabuchi bring back very varied photos from their travels, their primary concern being to document the built environment, but by extension to analyse the landscapes and understand the incidence of humans on where they live. The pair photograph astonishing landscapes, strange architecture, bizarre situations, joyful places and places fallen into disuse. It is a multi-faceted portrait of France, sometimes touching, sometimes absurd, never judgmental, which they produce in the course of their expedition. Back in their workshop, they sort their photographs by geographical location or by theme. The approach is reminiscent of that of Bernd and Hilla Becher, a pair of German photographers known for their frontal shots of industrial architecture, and of that of ‘La France’ by Raymond Depardon who documented France as it modernised itself, or the work of Walker Evans who made his name portraying the United States of the Great Depression from 1929 to the Second World War.

Friends from the GwinZegal art centre in fact wrote that “in contrast to the speed of our age, Nelly Monnier and Eric Tabuchi work in praise of slowness and small country roads. They drive around slowly in a small car, discreetly combing the landscape, punctuating this imaginary atlas with countless stops.”

There is no violence apparent in the works of Monnier and Tabuchi, but it can sometimes be detected underlying the image. The recent history of rural exodus and relocation is portrayed just as much as tales belonging to each region. The territories of France are shown in their full architectural plurality: slate denotes the roofs of Brittany whereas the ‘tuyés’ (large chimneys for smoking food) stand out in the landscape of Haut-Doubs, for example. The Passerelle exhibition reflects its own territory by being mainly comprised of images of Léon and Trégor, with pictures of menhirs, market gardens and landmarks that act as navigational aids for shipping, sometimes ‘enhanced’ by inscriptions from the now traditional ‘ACAB’ to the local ‘BZH Libre’ (Free Brittany). A series of paintings and collages introduces a certain strangeness to the more documentary corpus of the photographs, by seeking to extract the essence and soul of the places visited by the two artists. These paintings are in a way symbolic of their own approach: what they are aiming for is not an analysis of the architecture of France but a pointless and poetic quest for an intangible Holy Grail – a fictional history of our regions.

The exhibition ‘The Smoken Ridge’ is a chance to look again at the graphic work of Alan Fertil (1982, Quimper – 2015, Brussels). A graduate of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (National School of Fine Arts) in Paris, he spent his childhood and student days in Brittany, the United States and England. At the end of his course, he settled in Berlin then in Brussels in 2009 where he co-founded the collective known as ‘The Ister’, an association bringing together artists, exhibition curators and people working in art, with the aim of promoting young creativity. At that time Alan Fertil was known for his joint work with Damien Teixidor, focussed on street furniture, skateboard culture and D-I-Y. The pair exhibited in France at MAMO – Centre d’Art de la Cité Radieuse in Marseille, the 40mcube art centre in Rennes and in Brussels at MAAC, Maison d’Art Actuel des Chartreux. At the same time Alan Fertil was developing drawing which has never really been exhibited and is largely unknown. This part of his work was the subject of a book entitled ‘Alan Fertil, Drawings, Sketches and Notes’, recently published by Zéro2 with the support of the Antoine de Galbert Foundation, 40mcube and Passerelle.

Alan Fertil’s constant travelling between English- and French-speaking countries and his taste for literature permeate his works in which he includes many texts and words, including poetry, slogans and reflections. His works are in turn methodical and sketchy, showing the construction of the space surrounding us as well as an evolving chaos. His drawings are marked by a use of charcoal and graphite, giving them a dark and obscure depth. We are present at the construction of a unique universe, the creation of a world conceived in the mind of the artist. The last series by Alan Fertil is entitled ‘Ether Triumph’, evoking both the primordial Greek divinity ‘Aether’ and the term ‘ether’ from pre-Einstein physics (before 1905). The definition of ether seems in harmony with the feelings and settings of the artist’s drawings. In astronomy, it meant the fine fluid that was supposed to fill the space beyond the earth’s atmosphere, whereas in physics, ether was a hypothetical milieu that was extremely tenuous and elastic, found universally in both the void and in matter. Writing about this series, Bitsy Knox says that “matter vibrates enthusiastically, it circulates and remains contained, at both celestial and molecular scales. Great theories are freely deployed; this is science under the influence of intuition.”

The exhibition title, ‘The Smoken Ridge’, is taken from a work by the artist. It evokes his reflections inspired by science just as much as an interest in the organic and in landscape. Although many of his works demonstrate total abstraction, being inspired by space and astronomy, some reveal more prosaic attachments, more rooted in ‘reality’, using the vocabulary of botany and anatomy. So, tongues are alongside hands inspired by leaves, and constructions recall the famous Atomium in Brussels.

In a programme note, Alan Fertil wrote, “All shapes are of equal value, none deserves any special attention because none is independent of the others.”

For almost three months Caroline Thiery (1997, France) took part in the ‘Workshop residency’ programme run by Document d’Artistes Bretagne and Passerelle at the art centre. The result of this is the exhibition ‘Whatever remains from the ghosts’ which includes works produced on site during the residency.

Caroline Thiery’s ghosts are common and known to us all. They manufacture the past: vague feelings, memories of conversations, songs that keep playing endlessly in our heads, fleeting smiles on public transport and many other traces of everyday life. Generously sharing her experiences, Caroline Thiery plots a map of our social relationships, of love and friendship, family and culture. She looks in particular at our search for love and affection, subject to tension from the ambivalent desire for independence. She examines the new ways of meeting people such as the dating apps that have revolutionised the way we ‘consume’ relationships. The use of digital communication and the Internet, which does away with any notion of waiting or distance, has transformed dating behaviour both for better and for worse: the sending of dick pics (photos of penises) to strangers, the use of pick-up lines, little phrases intended to be romantic but in fact often clumsy or even offensive, and other new phenomena. Thanks to the digital world, seeking a relationship or a sexual partner has never been so easy for someone eager for passion, hidden behind his or her phone, lying under the duvet or scrolling while sitting on the toilet. The exhibition title also evokes ‘ghosting’, a very widespread practice since the appearance of dating sites, involving the ending of a relationship with no warning, by breaking off all forms of communication.

In addition to matters of the heart, Caroline Thiery questions our relationship with childhood and adolescence, creating various talismans and totemic objects which forge a possible past, like the ‘ghostly tartans’ with dog or swan motifs or a tropical landscape, decorated with texts. Where the adult world looks down on certain adolescent interests such as ‘fanfiction’ (writing stories based on works of fiction, films, games or series) or their attraction to pop music sometimes seen as kitsch, Caroline Thiery decides to take these practices and elevate them as symbols. She therefore produces a sculpture in honour of the singer Priscilla who found fame at the age of 12. Highlighting this French pop star means rehabilitating this devalued culture from an age of transition we have all lived through and which has made us what we are.

Text holds an essential place in the exhibition both because of narratives written by the artist, available to read in the rooms, and by the multiplication of phrases and words at the very heart of the works. The culture of the Internet meme (an element or phenomenon taken up and disseminated to a mass audience by the Internet, often an image with text added) is a vast source of inspiration. Memes are punchlines, slogans in a very particular context which sometimes require highly specialised knowledge of codes of comprehension. In the work of
Caroline Thiery, they take on original forms, they are funny, intimate, often universal. The anecdotes and stories, visual and written, used by the artist, interweave across each other eliciting no replies; it is up to the visitor to create their own history.

Le changement de nos rapports avec l’environnement passe très certainement par un réenchantement, un émerveillement face au vivant.
Lors de ses observations de la nature, Daniela Lorini s’est intéressée aux algues, ces organismes qui composent Une forêt sous la mer. Ce matériau naturel offre une multitude de formes, de textures et de couleurs, avec lequel joue l’artiste pour présenter son exploration subjective. Entre expérimentation autour de la techniquedu cyanotype et découverte d’un monde sous-marin, l’exposition propose un dialogue entre science et art.

À travers ses recherches, Daniela Lorini explore l’environnement et plus particulièrement la manière dont les organismes vivants cohabitent dans un même territoire. C’est en cherchant dans les détails de la nature qu’elle s’intéresse aux algues et à ce qui les compose. Offrant une multitude de formes, textures et couleurs, ce matériau naturel constitue aussi un écosystème riche et mystérieux.

Grâce à un processus à la fois créatif et scientifique, l’artiste invite à découvrir sa propre interprétation du monde sous-marin. Alliant expérimentation et poésie, Une forêt sous la mer propose une déambulation entre imaginaire et réalité magique.

Societas humana, donne à voir la société dans laquelle nous vivons, ses mécanismes, ses codes, son devenir. Que ce soit par les thèmes du travail, des loisirs, ou de l’écologie. Cette exposition est conçue pour réinterroger les interactions humaines et ce qui les régies.

Imagine that this communiqué is being joyfully bellowed out over a slightly crackling megaphone attached to the top of a van that has been customised with the colours of the art centre and a rainbow*; it is driving slowly through the streets of Rennes, trying to drum up business.

Listen up dear people of Rennes and of France: come and discover DARK-EN-CIEL, the new exhibition in full Technicolor by Bertille Bak, a formidable young artist, whose talent is being celebrated around the world!**

Colourful shows for the kids, 3D animations made with trickery and obvious subterfuges, actual sets out created from cardboard, circular and rectangular films, new works filled with frightening surprises and more.
Don’t miss Bertille Bak’s DARK-EN-CIEL: an exhibition that rolls over for you, takes you to the stars, cries foul, seesaws, and twists and twists again.

That’s DARK-EN-CIEL, 22 January until 24 April 2022 at La Criée, contemporary art centre and old fish market!

A conversation between two (very well-informed) shoppers after the van passes by:
– Bertille Bak … isn’t she that artist who’s interested in communities – often marginal, fragile or invisible – with whom she builds fictions, politically engaged and a little bit odd?
– Yes, that’s her. She started in the coalmines, in Barlin, on her grandmother’s housing estate, then she worked with the Roma in Ivry­‑sur‑Seine, nuns in Paris, maritime workers in Saint‑Nazaire, and further away, residents of a Bangkok neighbourhood being threatened with eviction, shrimp shellers in Morocco and suchlike.
– She seems to be making her way using the world’s miseries don’t you think? And what’s she showing in La Criée?
– She’s continuing to mine the exploitation vein. She’s showing a new project, Mineur Mineur, that she’s been working on for three years, about child labour in mines, and two other recent projects: Bleus de travail, in which she plays with birds, and La Brigada, filmed in La Paz in Bolivia, where she focused her lens on the city’s shoeshine boys.
– I see: so her films and installations sit at the tipping point between utopia and exploitation, enchantment and irony, reality and fiction, a taste for the absurd and a DIY spirit.
– That’s right, there’s a subversive, playful streak in Bertille Bak’s work, a kind of resistance, and I find a hint of Belgian humour, a dash of Wallace & Gromit, and a pinch Fischli & Weiss.
– Okay, now you’re just throwing names at me. Let’s go have a drink, just to get ourselves ready to see the exhibition …

* The exhibition’s title is a play on the French word for rainbow, arc-en-ciel .

** Bertille Bak has a number of solo exhibitions scheduled for 2022: at the Fondation Mario Merz in Turin, at the Louvre-Lens, and in Rennes at La Criée centre d’art contemporain and Galerie Art&Essai.

Animalia ou la vie fantasmée des animaux presents different works in which animals play a major role. Focused on animals familiar to humans, with which they are in daily contact, domestic animals, farm animals, or those traditionally hunted, but also those which, during our childhood, hide under our bed, in the cabin at the bottom of the garden, in the meanders of the nearby lake, in a distant country, and which populate our imaginations.

Anne Langlois

[2,3] – for 2 and 3D – is the title of the book by the artist Tauba Auerbach that will enter the collection in 2021 and that the Frac Bretagne will display for the first time in Rennes, from 21 January to 15 May 2022.

In this boxed set of artist’s books, six slim hardcover volumes open onto gigantic shapes inspired by complex geometric figures: pyramid, sphere, ziggurat, octagonal bipyramid (diamond), Möbius strip, etc. Reminiscent of children’s pop-up books, they are revealed in a palette of luminous and contrasting colours which recall the artist’s work.

[2,3] is the universal mathematical symbol for the closed interval between the integers two and three. For Tauba Auerbach, it marks the interstice in which she operates to animate 2D into 3D, allowing the cut-out shapes of the flattened and folded paper to be majestically transformed into expanded sculptures. The apparent fragility of the process starts a dialogue with the manifest qualities of stability and sturdiness traditionally associated with sculpture, to achieve a subtle union of emptiness and fullness.

This development of forms in space constitutes an important stage in the evolution of the artist’s work at the beginning of the 2010s. Until then restricted to optical effects on the flatness of the canvas (shadow plays replicating volume), her works open up to the third dimension and explore in a more comprehensive way this marked interest in the perception and animation of the surface.

Artist inhabited by a buried history of forms, materials and ritual practices, Thomas Teurlai invests spaces all over the world, from white cube to decaying industrial spaces. Uncovering stories, rearranging sounds, sculptures and human sciences, the artist brings back life and movement to abandoned objects and stories. From this meeting between the worlds of alchemy, DIY and the sacred emerge hybrid installations that solicit our erogenous zones. The visitor finds himself involved, body and soul, in these spaces of quirky poetry, where time seems to expand.

For his exhibition at Frac Bretagne, Thomas Teurlai focusses on subsidence, a geological phenomenon describing the sinking of mega-cities due to the pumping of underground water and intensive concreting. This global collapse serves as the start of a filmic wandering in subjective view.
Cyberpunk reverie where a ghost museum wanders its feet in the water, collapsing under the repeated assaults of spores and other antediluvian viruses. A wandering back in time, weaving together seemingly distant spaces.
There will be the mummies of street artists lying on the dusty banks of a stillborn story.
A radioactive granite astrolabe making up the soundtrack, like an inverted monolithic Theremin.
And a text as a epileptic spinning wheel, spinning the way off to exit the tunnel.
On the other side of the stained wormhole.

The Frac Bretagne presents the first exhibition of the American artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman in France.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman (b. 1981, Detroit, MI) is an artist and writer who uses found, archival material, and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Often working site-specifically, his work takes the form of installation, video, projections, photographic light boxes, and photo collages printed on layered transparencies and paper. Foregrounding the materiality of digital media and its degradation over time, Huffman’s approach dissolves explicit meaning in order to reconstitute it as objects in perpetual flux. Through projection and repetition, his work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through the flattening of symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Huffman derives much of his practice from the intersection of writing, poetry, found media and common speech, often cutting, sampling and shifting bits of video and excerpts of text into new formats. The idea of erasure—of certain voices, people, and ideas—as subject matter and as technique is central to his practice, in building up and removing layers of material in his videos and two dimensional collages.

Artist Manon de Boer and choreographer Latifa Laâbissi meet in 2015 during a workshop around the influence of Oskar Schlemmer and the fluidity of working across media and different artistic languages. For both, pluridisciplinarity is essential to their work. They decide to deepen their collaboration in a deliberately dilated, stretched temporality, and in diversified work contexts like itinerant conversations, memories of reading and gardening, correspondence and collages.

Their dialogue steps out from result-driven processes, steady rhythms and prefigured calendars. Both de Boer and Laâbissi have consolidated trajectories and working methods and saw in their collaboration an occasion to challenge inertia and function differently. In this way, and over time, they are building a common corpus of images, a mental map that they activate and explore, questioning each other’s discipline and advancing into a priori unknown territory.

The project Qui parle? / Wie spreekt? puts the voice at the fore front. It questions the voice’s timbre, language and accent.

The project has 2 parts: one choreographic (Ghost Party I) and the other video (Ghost Party II).

L’exposition Empreinte du reste, volume du manque rassemble une cinquantaine d’oeuvres de Paul Pouvreau, datant de la fin des années 1990 à aujourd’hui, proposant à la fois un cheminement parmi les images et dans les images elles-mêmes. Grâce à ce large éventail de sa production, on perçoit de quelle manière l’artiste rejoue avec ses photographies certains genres majeurs de l’histoire de la peinture (la nature morte, le paysage) ou principes esthétiques de mouvements artistiques du XXe siècle (le pop art, l’art conceptuel). Il en donne des versions pour ainsi dire bricolées, sans être dans l’imitation ni la parodie. Que ce soit dans ses dessins — où il retravaille des pages de journaux et des dépliants publicitaires par remplissage — ou dans sa nouvelle série photographique où il transforme par des jeux d’échelle et de lumière des sacs plastiques en d’éloquents masques de tragédie grecque, c’est toujours le même plaisir de faire qui l’anime. C’est ce plaisir de la fabrication qui lui permet de donner corps à des pensées et des formes, aussi fragiles soient-elles en apparence.

Biographie :

Paul Pouvreau est né en 1956 à Aulnay-sous-Bois. Il vit à Argenton-sur-Creuse et est professeur à l’École Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (ENSP) à Arles. Son travail artistique a fait l’objet de nombreuses expositions en France et à l’étranger : Centre Pompidou, Les Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, MAC VAL, CRAC de Sète, Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen, Frac Corse, Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris et Bruxelles, etc. Parmi ses dernières expositions personnelles, on peut citer citer Le Magazine des jours au Centre photographique d’Île-de-France (2019) ou encore Des choses à part à l’Artothèque de Vitré (2017). Ses œuvres sont présentes dans de nombreuses collections privées et publiques : Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), FRAC Alsace, FRAC Corse, FRAC Franche-Comté, FRAC Limousin, FRAC PACA, Artothèque de Caen, Artothèque de Vitré, Musée de Valence, etc.

Anaïs Touchot imagine une entreprise fictive comme différentes salles successives, salles d’attente. Comme dans une salle d’attente traditionnelle, vous trouverez à chaque étape : des magazines, des tableaux, des punchlines, des affiches de motivation, un panneau pédagogique, un design laid, des meubles de collectivité, des bandes sonores, fabriqués, pimpés par elle-même.
Comme on dit « deux salles deux ambiances », chaque salle aura un thème et un karma qui apportera sa pierre à la thérapie. Anaïs a pensé cette exposition à la manière de l’installation Coral Reef de Mike Nelson, dans le style de Francesco Finizio, alliant une approche pleine d’humour et d’auto-ironie qui initie des relations avec les objets et les produits de consommation. En les utilisant de manière non prescrite comme Shana Moulton avec un humour ironique, une sensibilité low-tech et pop. L’exposition se présente dans une esthétique plus précaire et se fond au monde du bien-être.
Avec des punchlines à la fois magico-politiques ou thérapeutiques, issues d’une surexploitation des codes de l’Art de la Communication; sans oublier le public, directement concerné, le visiteur doit traverser différents espaces, afin de procéder à chaque étape du désenchantement, tragique et comique.

L’inauguration de l’exposition aura lieu le samedi 15 janvier 2022 de 14h à 18h.